WHAT IS THERE 
IN RELIGION? 



HENRY SLOANE COFFIN 




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WHAT IS THERE IN RELIGION? 



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WHAT IS THERE 
IN RELIGION? 

Flumen Dei repletum est aquis. 



BY 

HENRY SLOANE COFFIN 

Minister in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, and 

Associate Professor in the Union Theological 

Seminary, New York City. 



Iftew UJorft 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1922 
All rights reserved 



£>■*>* 



Copyright, 1922, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1922 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 025249 
©CU6819 50 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMEBICA 



SEP 2/ 1922 



TO THE EEVEEEND PEESIDENT 

AETHUE CUSHMAN MC GIFFEET, PH.D., D.D., LL.D., 

MY TEACHEE, COLLEAGUE A1S T D CHIEF, 

IN HONOE AND AFFECTION 



Five of the following chapters were delivered upon the 
Merrick Lectureship on "practical and experimental re- 
ligion," at Ohio Wesleyan University, in April, 1922. 
The other chapters are added in order that the presenta- 
tion of the theme may be less fragmentary. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Kefreshment 1 

II. Cleansing 22 

III. Power 41 

IV. Illumination 60 

V. Fertility 75 

VI. Buoyancy ....... 88 

VII. Serenity and Adventure . . .102 

VIII. Beauty 123 

IX. Division and Unity 143 

X. Change and Permanence . : ., . 159 



CHAPTER I 

BEFRESHMESTT 

SHORTLY after the Armistice, a group of young 
people in. a town on the banks of the Hudson 
were discussing the state of the universe (a theme 
pleasing to younger minds because of its roominess), and 
they were mentioning factors to be counted upon in the 
remaking of a shattered world. One spoke of religion, 
and was abruptly challenged with the question: "What 
is there in religion anyhow ?" The eyes of the group 
turned towards an older man, who somewhat mystified 
the circle by asking: "What is there in the Hudson 
River anyhow?" He went on to answer bis own ques- 
tion by pointing out that what the river does for the ter- 
ritory through which it flows, that the Christian faith 
does for those whom it reaches. Trampers climbing Mt. 
Marcy meet the Hudson rising in Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, 
and slake their thirst from a cooling brook; so believing 
people discover refreshment in religion. A little farther 
on its course the brook provides campers with a bathing- 
pool where they wash themselves, and at its lower end 
the Hudson receives the filth of New York City from a 
hundred sewers and sweeps it out into the salt ocean. 
Thus religion cleanses individuals and communities. 
Along part of the river's course mills are built, and the 
stream supplies them with power. Religion has always 

been found an incalculable reinforcement. Sometimes 

1 



2 What Is There it* Religion? 

the power in the stream is transmuted into electricity and 
carried to light the streets and homes of towns. Faith 
has found illumination in fellowship with God. The 
entire valley through which the Hudson flows is made 
more fertile by the presence of this "body of water; and 
religion is a source of fruitfulness in human life. Upon 
the river's broader stretches steamers and barges carry 
freight and passengers; so believers know themselves up- 
held by their trust. The Hudson forms part of New 
York's Harbor, affording a quiet anchorage for ships, 
and opening out through the bay into the vast Atlantic 
it supplies a passage to the great deep. So religion both 
furnishes peace to men in search of haven, and an outlet to 
adventure on the boundless sea. The river beautifies the 
landscape ; and men of faith find life enhanced with love- 
liness when they are aware of the presence of the living 
God. The Hudson is a barrier, forming a dividing line 
between states and sundering those who dwell on oppo- 
site banks, but it is also a highway upon which ferries 
ply and steamers make daily connections between cities 
miles apart. Religion draws boundaries and separates 
men, whose convictions compel them to take clearly defined 
positions ; but it also is the great unifier, establishing in- 
tercourse between those who else would be without sense 
of kinship and unconnected. The Hudson, like all rivers, 
is constantly changing — flowing away to the ocean; but 
the stream remains a permanent part of the landscape — 
the watershed from the Adirondacks to the Atlantic. So 
religion is always in flux, seeming about to pass altogether, 
but forever renewed, an abiding element in human life — 
the never ceasing outgo of man's heart towards God, be- 



Reeeeshmeot 3 

cause that heart is continually replenished by inspirations 
from God. 

There was nothing novel in this illustration. Centuries 
ago a psalmist had sung: "There is a river the streams 
whereof make glad the city of God," and he was thinking 
of God's presence with His people, for he continued : "God 
is in the midst of her." And the prophet Ezekiel con- 
cludes his description of the redeemed and restored holy 
land by picturing a miraculous river ^which emerged from 
the threshold of the Temple in Jerusalem and brought life 
whithersoever its waters came. 

May I, a provincial New Yorker, crave your indulgence 
to employ our loved and admired Hudson as a parable, 
in attempting a fractional answer to the query, What is 
there in religion? 

We shall narrow the question somewhat, as though it 
read, What is there in Christian religion? because that 
faith has the only chance of gaining the attention of stu- 
dents in an American college ; and also because, as Dean 
Inge has well said, "Christianity is not a religion, but re- 
ligion itself in its most universal and deepest aspects." 
And we shall further limit our answer, as though the ques- 
tion read: "What is there in Christian religion which 
appeals to people of our day V* At Trenton, on the banks 
of the Delaware, there is a colonial house, equipped with 
a water-wheel which in George Washington's time 
ran a grist-mill. To-day the occupants of the house find 
it more convenient to buy their flour ; but the water-wheel 
is still in operation and generates electricity to light the 
house. The successive centuries find different uses for 
their fellowship with the living God. We shall freely 



4: What Is There in Religion? 

draw on all the centuries for illustrations, but we shall 
look for illustrations of those experiences which have 
worth for normal people among ourselves. We shall ap- 
peal oftenest to the experiences recorded in the Bible, be- 
cause its books contain the accounts of discoveries, which 
were made not only by their first explorers, but which have 
been repeated by many thousands since in every genera- 
tion. The reason the Bible remains the authority on the 
life of God with men is that it constantly proves its experi- 
ences true to age after age of those who employ it as 
their guide. A river is a continuous flow of water in a 
well-defined stream. It is the Bible, more than any other 
institution, which keeps the Christian religion a continu- 
ous and clearly recognizable stream of life with God 
through the centuries. Without it the water of divine 
life which had its origin in Jesus, collecting in Him from 
many earlier tributaries, would have become so mixed 
with alien currents, and would have flowed off into such 
widely separated river-beds, that it would have lost its 
identity. The water of life found its banks and its 
proper channel in the First Century, and the ISTew Testa- 
ment has held it permanently in its true course ever since. 
We cannot answer the question, What is there in Christian 
religion ? without looking first at the experiences contained 
in the Scriptures and tested and approved by the Church 
of all the following centuries. 

In selecting a parable as a guide to our answer, we 
obviously confine ourselves to the very partial presenta- 
tion of the subject which any one parable suggests. But 
we have excellent precedent for using a parable, and if 
it furnishes us with only a few glimpses of the vastest 



Eefkeshment 5 

of all themes, it may render those glimpses more clear 
and intelligible. 

Well, then, to our parable. Those who are familiar 
with the sources of the Hudson River in the Adirondacks 
know it first as a tiny brook which supplies them with 
a cool drink as they toil up the tallest mountain in the 
state. Believing people find religion refreshing. To be- 
gin with a few well-known utterances of the Bible, Jere- 
miah speaks of God as "the Fountain of living waters"; 
and when, in a despondent mood, he fears that he will 
miss the usual renewal of spirit, he thinks of the water- 
courses of Palestine which dry up in summer to the dis- 
appointment of expectant travelers, and asks : "Wilt Thou 
indeed be unto me as a deceitful brook, as waters that 
fail ?" The best loved Psalm runs : "He leadeth me beside 
the still waters. He restoreth my soul." Another psalm- 
ist employs the same figure of speech: "Thou shalt make 
them drink of the river of Thy pleasures. Por with Thee 
is the fountain of life." Still another, according to the 
text used by our English translators, pictures a company 
of singing and dancing worshipers, saying: "All my 
springs are in Thee." Jesus took up the metaphor in His 
conversation with the woman at the well in Sychar about 
living water, and in His saying at Jerusalem: "If any 
man thirst, let him come unto M.e and drink." And on 
the final page of the Bible stands the gracious invitation : 
"And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, 
let him take the water of life freely." These religious 
men (and one might multiply similar sayings from both 
Old and New Testaments) found their contacts with the 
Invisible reviving. 



6 What Is There in Religion? 

It is not a common opinion to-day that religion is re- 
freshing. Fellowship with the Lord of heaven and earth 
is looked on as sobering, rendering a man serious-minded, 
conscientious, burdened with the wrongs and woes of 
mankind, and awed with the momentous issues which 
hang upon his own dealings with good and evil. And it 
certainly should have this solemnizing result, for in re- 
ligion only that can help us before which we bow, but 
Biblical believers found it also exhilarating. They spoke 
of going unto God their "exceeding Joy," and bade one 
another "Rejoice in the Lord alway." Both because out- 
siders mistake its essential character, and because insiders 
often fail to realize what is theirs, a widespread protest 
has called the Christian faith depressing. The brilliant 
Trench novelist, George Sand, speaks wearily of "the 
Deity of the crucifix." Swinburne puts his feelings on 
the lips of a pagan addressing Christ after Christianity 
had been officially proclaimed at Rome: 

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has 
grown grey from Thy breath." 

Ibsen makes the Emperor Julian apostatize from a faith 
which robs life of its zest and thrill : "To thee I make my 
offering, O Dionysus, God of Ecstasy, who dost lift up 
the souls of mortals out of abasement." Undoubtedly the 
French-woman familiar with Roman Christianity, and 
the Englishman and Scandinavian brought up among 
Protestants, had some reason for their complaint that re- 
ligion, as they had seen it, supplied its votaries with no 
gayety of soul. 



Refreshment 7 

But had they listened to contemporaries compelled by- 
skepticism to abandon Christian faith, they might have 
heard them lamenting a loss of vitality. Ernest Kenan, 
destined for the Roman priesthood and led out of the 
Catholic Church by doubts, confesses : "Since Christian- 
ity is not true, nothing interests me or appears worthy of 
my attention." !N*o substitute ever takes the place of the 
discarded religion in his enthusiasm, and the best work 
of his life is done upon studies connected with the Bible. 
With a somewhat similar mental experience, Edmond 
Scherer, a Protestant, writes: "So I see myself carried 
away by my intellectual convictions towards a future that 
inspires in me neither interest nor confidence." About 
the same time, in England, John Addington Symonds 
complains of his unbelieving state of mind, and comments : 
"Such skepticism is like a blighting wind : nothing thrives 
beneath it. How can a man who has not made up his 
mind about the world and immortality, who seeks and 
cannot find God, care for politics, for instance?" And 
on our side of the Atlantic, one of Yale's foremost grad- 
uates, the poet Edward Rowland Sill, who had abandoned 
his plan of entering the ministry, wrote to a classmate: 
"People think that a thinking man's speculations about 
religion interfere with his daily life very little — but 
how certain conclusions do take the shine out of one's 
existence." These men of sad lucidity of soul looked 
forth on an overcast world, where nothing sparkled, and 
found the heart for vigorous living gone from them. 

Or had these who condemn Christian faith as banish- 
ing lifers zest listened to appreciative estimates of an 
artist, so little Christian by personal conviction as Goethe, 



8 What Is Thebe in Religion? 

they would have found him employing religion to recall 
his best known character from suicide. Faust, hopeless of 
probing nature's secrets, oppressed with the misery and 
paltriness of man's lot, is about to take the poisoned gob- 
let when he hears the Chorus welcoming Easter morning 
with the hymn: "Christ is arisen !" It takes him back 
to his earlier and more believing days: 

Once Heavenly Love sent down a burning kiss 

Upon my brow, in Sabbath silence holy; 

And, filled with mystic presage, chimed the church-bell 

slowly, 
And prayer dissolved me in a fervent bliss. 
A sweet uncomprehended yearning 
Drove forth my feet through woods and meadows free, 
And, while a thousand tears were burning, 
I felt a world arise for me. 

These chants, to youth and all its sports appealing, 
Proclaimed the Spring's rejoicing holiday; 
And memory holds me now with childhood's feeling 
Back from the last, the solemn way. 
Sound on, ye hymns of Heaven, so sweet and mild, 
My tears gush forth : the Earth takes back her child ! 

Without question life is a fatiguing affair, in which 
idealists are disillusioned, enthusiasts bored into cynics, 
and the most indomitable souls suffer the slings and ar- 
rows of outrageous fortune. Eeligion frequently seems 
to make it a sadder and more impossible undertaking. The 
Christian has a loftier standard for himself and for 
society, and if the lower ideals of his neighbors are unat- 
tainable, he is more surely doomed to perpetual failure 
and discouragement. Contact with Christ softens his 



Refreshment 9 

sympathies and sensitizes his conscience, so that men's 
woes and his own iniquities become more painful. When 
he places the cross in the center of his outlook, he is aware 
that the same forces which accomplished the fell disaster 
at Golgotha are still active ; and for him there is a dark- 
ness over all the earth where a loving God is ever in 
anguish with and for His sinning children. The believer 
is not spared the strains and disheartenments of other men, 
and his fellowship with Christ both immeasurably in- 
creases his sense of responsibility and his consciousness 
of his own unworthiness. What Christian can view the 
world of our time with its brutalities surviving from a 
long obsolete past, with its age-old hatreds fanned into in- 
tensei flame by the gales of passion which have swept over 
our generation, with its industrial injustices and racial 
antipathies, with animalism thinly veiled in much that 
passes for amusing, and with countless absurdities still 
taken seriously by an unthinking and stupid public, with- 
out raising the impatient cry: "O Lord, how long?" 
There often appears to be a cruel perversity in the uni- 
verse which cuts off promising careers, allows the well- 
meaning unwittingly to work harm, couples clever brains 
with an unscrupulous conscience and a kind heart with 
a dull head, and into the most wisely contrived and lov- 
ingly intentioned plan introduces an unsuspected factor 
to complicate and defeat it. Again and again frank be- 
lievers feel disposed to tell the Controller of events: 
"Thou hast showed Thy people hard things: Thou hast 
made us to drink the wine of staggering." Our fellow- 
mortals are frequently a bitter disappointment. Some 
whom we love and respect, as Hamlet had his mother, 



10 What Is There in Religion? 

display a coarseness or a disloyalty of which we had not 
dreamed, and then 

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable 
Seem to us all the uses of this world! 

The littleness of men — the trifles which amuse them, their 
pettiness in their virtues and in their vices — causes us 
to disparage humanity as a race of Liliputians. 

For goodness all ignoble seems 

Ungenerous and small, 
And the holy are so wearisome, 

Their very virtues pall. 

And of all mankind none tire and bore us like ourselves. 
Back of all our difficulties with circumstances, and behind 
all our disagreements with people, we discover a chronic 
offender who is chargeable with almost every blunder and 
implicated in every folly which brings us defeat and un- 
happiness. We may be sick of the world and of men, 
but we are more sick of ourselves. 

And the first effect of religion, like that of some medi- 
cines, may be to make us feel sicker yet. Many persons 
take their religion in such small doses that they never ex- 
perience more than this first result. Their acquaintance 
with God in Christ is just enough to increase their dis- 
relish for the world and people and themselves. That 
disgust is of itself an advantage: it means a growth in 
conscience. One cannot but honor disgusted men as they 
grimly combat intolerable conditions, lay themselves out 
to serve people to whom they are drawn by no liking, and 
take themselves sternly in hand. But they are far re- 



Kefreshment 11 

moved from those who with joy draw water out of the 
wells of salvation. Mr. Birrell, in his life of Charlotte 
Bronte, describes her religion as a "robust Church of 
Englandism, made up of cleanliness, good works and 
hatred of humbug — all admirable things certainly, but 
not specifically religious." And he remarks of the bril- 
liant daughters in that Yorkshire rectory that "alone 
amongst the sisters Anne had enough religion to give her 
pleasure." 

"Enough religion to give her pleasure" — it is its pos- 
session in insufficient quantities which has given the false 
impression that it is not refreshing. When men have 
enough of it, they find it as reviving as a mountain-brook. 
Old Franz Joseph Haydn told Caprani that "at the 
thought of God his heart leaped for joy, and he could not 
help his music doing the same." And from that glad 
spirit came the best known interpretations of "The Crea- 
tion" and "The Seasons." 

Eeligion affects men's physical and mental condition. 
The publication of William James' Letters disclosed one 
of the most striking cases, reported in his Edinburgh lec- 
tures as from a correspondent, to be an account of his 
own experience. When he was twenty-eight or there- 
abouts, he found himself in wretched health, with no con- 
genial task for which his strength was adequate, and tor- 
tured with philosophic questions. He was obsessed with 
a haunting fear of existence and a horror of ending his 
days in a lunatic asylum. 



"In general, I dreaded," he says, "to be left alone. I 
remember wondering how other people could live, how I 



12 What Is Thebe isr Religion? 

myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of in- 
security beneath the surface of life. My mother, in par- 
ticular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect 
paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may 
well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revela- 
tions of my own state of mind." His terror, he tells us, 
was "so pervasive and powerful, that, if I had not clung 
to scripture-texts like The eternal God is my refuge, etc., 
Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, etc., 
I am the Resurrection and the Life, etc./ I think I should 
have grown really insane." 

There speaks a man ill in body and mind kept going by 
religion. 

Now that we have this chapter in Professor James' per- 
sonal experience, we read with added interest the para- 
graph in which he says to his Scottish audience : 

"There is a state of mind known to religious men, but 
to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold 
our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our 
mouths and be as nothing in the floods and water-spouts 
of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has 
become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our 
moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The 
time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy 
relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present 
with no discordant future to be anxious about, has ar- 
rived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere mo- 
rality; it is positively expunged and washed away." 

During the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, the head of a 
nurses' training-school in a large city hospital, with many 
of her usual force in France, found herself obliged to 
work twenty hours out of twenty-four, and at the end of 



Refreshment 13 

two weeks she was so worn out that one Saturday night 
she said to herself: "I must consult a nerve-specialist, 
or . . ." (and she did not know why she suggested the 
other alternative, for she had not attended religious serv- 
ices in years) "or go to church." The next evening 
towards eight o'clock one of her nurses saw her slipping 
out of the hospital and protested that she ought to go to 
bed ; hut she walked a few blocks to a neighboring church, 
had the current of her thought directed by the worship 
into a new channel, felt herself uplifted, calmed, renewed, 
and she returned to her work with a freshness of spirit 
and a repaired will for work. 

Eeligion restores the morale for life. "We mentioned the 
experience of weariness in the struggle for ideals, which 
gives Christians a disgust with the universe. Matthew 
Arnold speaks of the first followers of Christ as "drawing 
from the spiritual world a source of joy so abundant that 
it ran over upon the material world and transfigured it." 
The New Testament for all its stress and strain, its fight- 
ing without and fears within, is a jubilant book. 'No men 
have ever said harsher things in condemnation of an evil 
world than the Christian leaders throughout the centuries ; 
but they are never disheartened for long. Their faith 
keeps them in high spirits. In.the Second Century Clem- 
ent of Alexandria writes : "Holding festival in our whole 
life, persuaded that God is on every side present, we cul- 
tivate our fields praising, we sail the sea singing." In the 
Thirteenth Century Francis of Assisi asserts: "The 
servants of God are, like jugglers, intended to revive the 
hearts of men and lead them into spiritual joy." In the 
Sixteenth, Martin Luther declares: "It is impossible for 



14 What Is There in Religion? 

one who hopes in God not to rejoice; even if the world 
falls to wreck, he will be overwhelmed undismayed under 
the ruins." And in our own day an essayist takes up 
this same strain, and tells the Twentieth Century : "Wher- 
ever you have belief, you will have hilarity. If we are 
to be truly gay, we must believe that there is some eternal 
gayety in the nature of things. The thing called high 
spirits is possible only to the spiritual." Behind events 
which go bitterly wrong and circumstances which seem 
unconscionably unresponsive to every effort to better them, 
faith has sight of Him who is primarily accountable for 
the ongoings of the universe, and whispers: "The Crea- 
tor of the ends of the earth f ainteth not, neither is weary." 
He is tirelessly at work on a refractory world ; if He must 
wait His time, He lacks neither patience nor persistency ; 
He will not fail nor be discouraged, and He is able to 
accomplish His goodwill. Believers know how to be still ; 
to remind themselves that God lives and rules ; that what 
He stands they can endure; and that as He perseveres 
they must bear Him company. They look for the appar- 
ently impossible; and if it accords with the mind of 
Christ, they say quietly: "Behold, it shall come to pass." 
Religion repairs our weariness with our fellow-mortals. 
Faber voiced a common mood in his lines, entitled, Low 
Spirits: 

Fever, and fret, and aimless stir, 

And disappointed strife, 
All chafing unsuccessful things, 

Make up the sum of life. 

Love adds anxiety to toil, 
And sameness doubles cares, 



Eefeeshment 15 

While one unbroken chain of work 
The flagging temper wears. 

The light and air are dulled with smoke; 

The streets resound with noise; 
And the soul sinks to see its peers 

Chasing their joyless joys. 

And he passes to a less common mood, but to one familiar 
to those who seriously use their religion. 

Sweet thought of God! now do thy work 

As thou hast done before; 
Wake up, and tears will wake with thee, 

And the dull mood be o'er. 

The very thinking of the thought, 

Without or praise or prayer, 
Gives light to know, and life to do, 

And marvelous strength to bear. 

Oh, there is music in that thought 

Unto a heart unstrung, 
Like sweet bells at the evening-time 

Most musically rung. 

A contemporary, who loathed Father Faber's ecclesias- 
ticism, bears witness to the same experience of renewal 
when, out of sorts with the obtuseness of conscience and 
hardness of heart of men who should have been better, 
he reminds himself of God. In the Diary of the Earl 
of Shaftesbury for May, 1854, are the following entries: 

"Great anxiety about Bill for relief of Chimney Sweep- 
ers. Have suffered actual distress through solicitude for 
prevention of these horrid cruelties. . . . 



16 What Is There iis* Religion? 

"The Government in the House of Commons threw out 
the Chimney Sweepers Bill, and said not a word of sym- 
pathy for the wretched children, nor of desire to amend 
the law. • . . 

" Very sad and low about the loss of the Sweeps Bill. . . . 
The Collar of the Garter might have choked me; I have 
not, at least, this or any other Government favor against 
me as a set-off to their insolence and oppression. I must 
persevere, and by God's help so I will ; for however dark 
the view, however contrary to all argument the attempt, 
however painful and revolting the labor, I see no Scrip- 
ture reason for desisting; and the issue of every toil is 
in the hands of the Almighty." 

And when one has to do with some petty, cranky, touchy 
individual, who tries one's nerves and strains one's en- 
durance, there is no refreshment comparable to the recol- 
lection of Calvary. From its summit flows a river of de- 
votion down to this unpromising man; and as, with St. 
Paul, we call him "the brother for whose sake Christ 
died," we are renewed with the love that beareth, believeth, 
hopeth, endureth all and never f aileth. 

Religion restores a man's respect for himself. All of 
us know times when we cannot find names bad enough to 
characterize what we are in our own eyes. We speak of 
ourselves as "beasts." A psalmist once used that epithet 
of himself: "So brutish was I and ignorant; I was as a 
beast before Thee." And the particular kind of animal 
he had in mind was a thick-skinned, clumsy, hideous crea- 
ture, like the hippopotamus (Behemoth). The biog- 
raphies of the saints of every communion contain uncom- 
plimentary opinions of themselves; and it is their own 
awkwardness constantly foiling their desire to be service- 



Refreshment 17 

able, their unmanageableness even in the hands of God 
like hulking, stupid brutes, their personal unattractive- 
ness as representatives of the Divine, that disgusts them. 
"I was as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am con- 
tinually with Thee: Thou hast holden my right hand." 
To think of God's unfailing presence, evidencing His 
continuing regard, renews self-respect. 

And even more remarkable is the refreshment men have 
found in their religion when wearied with God. A French 
archbishop, in a letter of spiritual counsel, advises his 
correspondent : "If you are bored by God, tell Him that 
He bores you." And instinctively believing souls go to 
God in an appeal against His own dealings with them, 
and find their spirits heartened. Job's speeches are the 
classic instance, in which this sufferer turns from the God 
who seems to be his enemy to the same God whom he can- 
not help feeling to be on his side. Against God he strength- 
ens himself in God. One finds a similar experience in 
two tragic scenes. Euripides, in a sublime attempt to 
bring home to his countrymen the horrors of war, pictures 
the Trojan women after the sack of their city, enslaved 
by their conquerors and about to be carried away from 
their loved native-land to Greece. He shows us their 
woeful figures sitting disconsolate among the ruins while 
their captors announce to whom each is allotted; and he 
makes his climax of sorrow that heart-rending scene when 
Hector's little son, Astyanax, is torn from his mother's 
embrace and flung from the walls. The old grandmother, 
Hecuba, looks out on the ships lying at anchor, and re- 
calls how they breast the storms until at last 



18 What Is There in Religion? 

Too strong breaks the o'erwhelming sea: lo, then 

They cease, and yield them up as broken men 

To fate and the wild waters. Even so 

I in my many sorrows bear me low, 

ITor curse, nor strive that other things may be. 

The great wave rolled from God hath conquered me. 

And while acknowledging the calamity as from God, she 
has tried to pray, but the gods appear helpless : 

Ye Gods. . . . Alas ! why call on things so weak 
For aid? Yet there is something that doth seek, 
Crying, for God, when one of us hath woe. 

And she addresses her prayer: 

Thou deep Base of the world, and Thou high Throne 
Above the world, whoe'er Thou art, unknown 
And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be, 
Or Reason of our Reason; God, to Thee. 
I lift my praise. 

It may be reading too much into the drama of doubting 
Euripides to see these women in their unrelieved gloom 
drawing any renewal from religion; but it is significant 
that they try to find comfort in God and that the prayer 
becomes praise. We set beside these desolate women out- 
side the walls of sacked Ilium another tragic group of 
women outside the walls of Jerusalem, watching afar off 
a Sufferer in mortal agony upon a shameful cross between 
two thieves, while His mother stands beneath Him, broken 
with sorrow. The scene in the Gospels gives the same 
sense of cruel disaster, the same suffering of the innocent 
for the guilty, the same turning to God in puzzled ques- 



Refreshment 19 

tioning at His dealings: "My God, My God, why hast 
Thou forsaken Me?" And here surely we find the re- 
freshment that religion brings, the renewal in God against 
God. The Sufferer waiting upon God renews His strength, 
and goes triumphantly through death. 

And religion is a source of refreshment always at hand. 
It is not like mountain air or sea breezes to which one 
must travel; it is "'the brook in the way" of which men 
drink and lift up the head. You will, perhaps, forgive 
a !N"ew Yorker another local allusion, if I refer to lines in 
which a minor poet puts this accessibility of the reviving 
water of religion, entitled On a Subivay Express. 

I who have lost the stars, the sod, 
For chilling pave and cheerless night, 

Have made my meeting-place with God 
A new and nether night. 

A figment in the crowded dark, 
Where men sit muted by the roar, 

I ride upon the whirring Spark 
Beneath the city's floor. 

You that 'neath country skies can pray, 
Scoff not at me — the city clod; — 

My only respite of the Day 
Is this wild ride — with God. 

We have been speaking of the fellowship of God as 
refreshment; many believers go further and call it stim- 
ulant. In pre-christian faiths, lower and higher, com- 
munion with the unseen excites and releases the emotions, 
and exalts men as with the wine of gladness. Plutarch 



20 What Is There in Religion? 

has left us a description of the effect of the cult with 
which he was familiar : 

"Nothing gives us more joy than what we see and do 
ourselves in divine service, when we carry the emblems, 
or join in the sacred dance, or stand by at the sacrifice 
or initiation. ... It is when the soul most believes and 
perceives that the god is present, that she most puts from 
her pain and fear and anxiety, and gives herself up to joy, 
yes, even as far as intoxication and laughter and merri- 
ment. ... In sacred processions and sacrifices not only 
the old man and the old woman, nor the poor and lowly, 
but 'the thick-legged drudge that sways her at the mill/ 
and household slaves and hirelings are uplifted by joy and 
triumph. Rich men and kings have always their own 
banquets and feasts — but the feasts in the temples and at 
initiations, when men seem to touch the divine most 
nearly in their thought with honor and worship, have a 
pleasure and a charm far more exceeding. And in this 
no man shares who has renounced the belief in Providence. 
For it is not abundance of wine, nor the roasting of meat, 
that gives the joy in the festivals, but also a good hope, and 
a belief that the god is present and gracious, and accepts 
what is being done with a friendly mind*" 

There is a devout man's testimony to the stimulus which 
his feelings receive in fellowship with Deity. And the 
JsTew Testament thinks of the filling with the Spirit as a 
substitute not for water, but for wine. To view life as 
Jesus saw it ruled by the heart of a Father like Himself, 
to be caught by His vision of a world remade to conform 
to that Father's mind, to be baptized into His passion to 
bring that vision to pass, and to look forward confidently 
to sharing its realization forever in the Father's many 
mansions, is not only to be cooled and freshened in one's 



Refbeshment 21 

exhaustion, but to be set a-tingle to go, despite every fa- 
tigue and discouragement, and keep devoting one's last 
ounce of energy to a cause which claims us altogether. 
Bliss Carman has voiced this exhilarating quality in re- 
ligion : 

Lord of my heart's elation, 
Spirit of things unseen. . . . 
Be Thou my exaltation 
Or fortitude of mien, 
Lord of the world's elation, 
Thou Breath of things unseen. 

The many instances quoted of men to whom faith 
opened the Fountain of life have surely served to illus- 
trate a final point that religion makes the believer him- 
self a refreshing person. "He that believeth on Me, from 
within him shall flow rivers of living water." In a dis- 
illusioned period, when hearts are sick with hope de- 
ferred, when the frightful sacrifices of a world bled nigh 
to death have issued in paltry results, when the most 
ardent appear jaded, he whose fellowship with God keeps 
him of good heart, confident that all needed resources are 
at hand in the most near Lord of all, seems like a stream 
from the everlasting hills to his thirsty and drooping com- 
rades. In a shifting world, where opinions are in flux, 
customs changing, and restlessness is an infection in the 
air, he who is steadfastly sure of God towers like a giant 
rock, and men shelter themselves beside him. Religion, 
provided a man has enough of it, makes him "as rivers of 
water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a 
weary land." 



CHAPTEE II 

CLEAISTSIKG 

ON summer days along the Hudson's upper reaches 
one sees soiled trampers going in for a cleansing 
dip, and as the river sweeps by New York City 
hundreds of sewers discharge their filth into its waters 
to be carried out into the purifying salt ocean. The river 
is a means of cleanliness and health. So men find that 
their contacts with God wash mind and conscience, and 
wherever the Christian ideal goes throughout our world, 
the social life is purified. 

The Bible is full of this cleansing effect of religion ; and 
in quoting its witness, one is not slighting similar testi- 
mony from other faiths, but using its passages as sum- 
ming up the highest and most widely tested religious ex- 
periences of mankind. "Though your sins be as scarlet, 
they shall be as white as snow." "I will sprinkle clean 
water upon you, and ye shall be clean : from all your filthi- 
ness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new 
heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put 
within you." "He is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' 
soap." The New Testament presents "the Lamb of God, 
who taketh away the sin of the world." 

No one ever exposed the polluting factors resident in 
human nature more clearly than Jesus : "For from with- 
in, out of the heart of man, evil thoughts proceed, fornica- 
tions, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, wickednesses, 

22 



Cleansing 23 

deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing, pride, foolish- 
ness; all these evil things proceed from within, and de- 
file the nian." But He and His followers were confident 
that the same heart of man could be cleaned and made the 
seat of motives as purifying as these were defiling. Paul 
mentions a number of the dirtiest and worst elements in 
the notorious city of Corinth, and adds : "Such were some 
of you : but ye were washed in the name of the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and in the Spirit of our God." The Gospel which 
he proclaims "renews" men's minds. James insists that 
the genuinely devout man shall keep himself "unspotted 
from the world" ; and John announces that they who walk 
in the light of Christ are cleansed by His blood from all 
sin. There is a graphic description of the socially purify- 
ing effect of religion in Ezekiel's picture of the magical 
stream, which issues from the temple at Jerusalem, and 
flowing down to the Dead Sea so heals its briny waters 
that they teem with fish. Another prophet speaks of a 
fountain opened in Jerusalem for sin and for unclean- 
ness; and the seer on Patmos portrays a great multitude 
with robes washed white in the blood of the Lamb. And 
these passages, let us remember, have become holy scrip- 
tures to millions because they picture experiences of the 
cleansing by religion which they themselves have in some 
measure repeated. 

When one turns from the Bible to the writings of those 
who in the first centuries passed from paganism into the 
Christian Church, one discovers these followers of Jesus 
vividly aware that a transforming river is flowing in the 
new religion which has entered the Eoman world. The 
philosopher Justin writes: 



24 What Is Thebe ik Religion? 

"We who formerly delighted in sexual license now em- 
brace chastity alone ; we who once used magical arts dedi- 
cate ourselves to the good and unbegotten God; we who 
valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and pos- 
sessions, now bring what we have into a common stock, 
and distribute to every one in need; we who hated and 
destroyed one another, and on account of their manners 
would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since 
the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray 
for our enemies, and endeavor to persuade those who hate 
us unjustly to live conformably to the good precepts of 
Christ." 

The African lawyer, Tertullian, flings back at the de- 
tractors of Christianity their own remarks about acquain- 
tances who have embraced the new religion: "What a 
woman she was ! how wanton ! how gay ! What a young 
blade he was ! how profligate ! how dissipated ! — they have 
become Christians !" "So," he adds, "the hated name is 
given to reformation of character." Origen answers the 
attacks of Celsus, who holds the usual opinion of a man 
of the world that human nature cannot be altered, and 
then charges Christians with peculiarly vile iniquities : 

"The work of Jesus reveals itself among all mankind 
where communities of God founded by Jesus exist, which 
are composed of men reclaimed from a thousand vices; 
and to this day the name of Jesus can produce a marvel- 
ous meekness of spirit and complete change of character, 
and humanity, and goodness, and gentleness, in those who 
have honestly accepted the teaching concerning God and 
Christ." 

And Lactantius, who had spent years as a teacher, and 
knew the futility of trying to make men over by the vir- 



Cleansing 25 

tuous precepts of the wisest sages, having late in life be- 
come a Christian, says confidently: 

"Give me one who is grasping, covetous and stingy; I 
will presently hand him back to you generous, and freely 
giving his money with full hands. Give me a man who 
is afraid of pain and death; he shall shortly despise 
crosses, and fires, and the torture. Give me one who is 
lustful, an adulterer, a glutton; you shall soon see him 
sober, chaste, and temperate. A few precepts of God so 
entirely change the whole man, that you would not recog- 
nize him as the same." 



Admitting that there may be in these statements the ex- 
aggeration of the enthusiastic devotee, they bear eloquent 
witness to the sense of a cleansing force in the Christian 
religion. 

In a society long familiar with the ideals of Jesus, we 
are often not aware of the moral rottenness from which 
He spares us. New Yorkers seldom think of the service 
which the ceaselessly flowing Hudson renders our city ; its 
cleansing goes on unnoticed. One has to live for a time 
in a non-Christian land, become acquainted with family- 
life in homes unhallowed by the Gospel, watch the plight 
of woman, see how cheap human life is held and what 
cruelties are inflicted without compunction, find vices 
which occur rarely and only among the most degenerate 
of our population accepted as matters of course, breathe 
in an atmosphere unvitalized by the breezes which flow 
from the hillsides of Galilee and from Calvary, to ap- 
preciate what Christianity has done for our society. An 
eminent university professor, himself (I understand) 



26 What Is There ik Religion? 

without avowed Christian loyalty, after lecturing exten- 
sively in China is reported to have said that in America 
he had taken too much for granted. He found in a non- 
Christian land an absence of that moral background to 
which he had been accustomed to appeal. Although many 
thousands of our people profess no regard for Christ and 
never connect their principles with Him, we are as much 
indebted for our moral health to the presence of His 
standards, as is 2sTew York City for its well-being to its 
usually unthought-of purifying Hudson. 

What the early leaders of the Church saw happening 
about them, unbiased observers notice in the work of 
Christian missions to-day. To scan the faces which one 
sees in a Chinese or Korean market-place, and then to 
look into the faces of a gathering of Christians in the 
same town, is to be struck with the transfiguring power 
of the Gospel. Charles Darwin, reporting his voyage in 
the southern Pacific, wrote: "The lesson of the mission- 
aries is the enchanter's wand. The march of improve- 
ment consequent on the introduction of Christianity 
through the South Seas probably stands by itself in the 
records of history." A British officer, in an account of 
two African campaigns in the London Spectator some 
years ago, introduces a word of admiration for the work 
of the Scotch Mission in the Shire Highlands: "First 
you must see the negro boy in his savage state, and then 
see the finished article as turned out by the Blantyre Mis- 
sion, and I think that you will say that truly the thing 
is little short of marvelous — from a wild, unkempt, sav- 
age urchin, with a rag for a wardrobe, to a pleasant, self- 
possessed lad, who dresses in spotless white garments, 



Cleansing 27 

can read and write, and conducts himself with quiet de- 



corum." 



Dr. Schweitzer, versatile musician and Biblical critic, 
who went out as a physician to Equatorial Africa, writes 
of his first impression of a Christian congregation : 

"As we mounted the hill through the rows of neat bam- 
boo huts belonging to the negroes, the chapel doors opened 
for service. We were introduced to some of the congrega- 
tion and had a dozen black hands to shake. What a con- 
trast between these clean and decently clothed people and 
the blacks that we had seen in the seaports, the only kind 
of native we had met up to now ! Even the faces are not 
the same. These had a free and yet modest look in them 
that cleared from my mind the haunting vision of sullen 
and unwilling subjection, mixed with insolence, which 
had hitherto looked at me out of the eyes of so many ne- 
groes." 

One of my own cherished memories is of a visit to a com- 
munity of earnest Christians on Lake Biwa in Japan, 
composed of people of varied stations — students, farmers, 
a physician, an architect, an ex-Bucldhist priest, and sev- 
eral interesting women — who looked back on their pre- 
Christian life as essentially unclean, and whose devotion 
to Jesus showed itself in a thorough-going consecration 
and in a purity beyond that commonly insisted on among 
American Christians. John's declaration concerning 
Jesus is superbly confirmed : the Lamb of God does "take 
away" the sin of the world. There are plenty of faults 
in the best of Christians, but one has only to read history 
or to observe the ways of non-Christian communities to 
realize how many forms of loathsome evil disappear where 



28 * Wha^ Ts There ii* Keligion ? 

men have felt, however unconsciously, the uplifting and 
shaming touch of Jesus. Hosts of excellent people in 
Christendom, who consider themselves nowise indebted 
to Jesus of Nazareth, and sometimes speak slightingly of 
Him, have pure and affectionate homes, move in a society 
where there are countless incentives to unselfishness, and 
are themselves high-principled, tender-hearted, and keen 
of conscience, because centuries ago Christ lived and died, 
and in His life and cross set flowing a river of spiritual 
motives which has cleaned and vitalized both them and 
their neighbors. In many non-Christian communities the 
small groups of believers exercise a cleansing influence 
upon social standards out of all proportion to their num- 
bers or prestige. The ideals which they hold, and which 
they illustrate, set in motion little rivulets of the Christian 
Spirit which purify the minds of many who have no per- 
sonal touch with Christ. And in long-established Chris- 
tian societies the majority of people are not even exposed 
to numberless gross and filthy sins, which fiercely tempt 
men and women without their inspirations. Christ has 
removed the inclination to and taste for such things, and 
developed an instinctive repugnance to them. 

"Not can we forget the cleansing of smirched lives 
and the salvation of the dregs of our own social 
order by the religion of Christ through the ministry 
of those who, like their Master, have felt themselves spe- 
cially commissioned to seek the lowest and the lost. 
Vachel Lindsay has set before us the tatterdemalion group 
who owed their rescue and redemption to one such notable 
ministry in his lines entitled General William Booth En- 
ters Into Heaven: 



Cleansing 29 

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum. 

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 
The saints smiled gravely, and they said, "He's come." 

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 
Walking lepers followed rank on rank, 
Lurching bravos from the ditches dank, 
Drabs from the alleyways and drug-fiends pale — 
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail! 
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath, 
Unwashed legions with the ways of death — 

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 

... It was queer to see 

Bull-necked convicts with that land made free! 
. . . Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole ! 
Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl; 
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean, 
Rulers of empires, and of forests green ! 

It is not an overdrawn picture of the recreating and trans- 
figuring power of the Gospel as preached and applied by 
spirits afire with earnestness. 

In outstanding Christians, where the flow of the Spirit 
is not a trickle but a river, one is usually aware of a 
cleansed sanctity. Professor Masson, treating of the lit- 
erature of the Restoration period, calls attention to the 
fastidiousness in matters of speech of John Bunyan, the 
tinker. While university men used coarse expressions, 
Bunyan, a man of the common people and thrown with 
the lowest for twelve years in Bedford gaol, was kept by 
his religion from the slightest filthiness of utterance in an 
age where such cleanliness of phrase was rare indeed. 
George Herbert attributed to his ideal country parson a 
purity of mind "breaking out and dilating itself even to 



30 What Is There iist Keligion? 

his body, clothes and habitation/' And this ideal was 
realized in the spiritual impression of one of the greatest 
city preachers and pastors, Dr. Thomas Chalmers, of whom 
Lord Eosebery said in a memorial address a few years 
ago: 

"He wrote enormously, he spoke continually, he re- 
vealed his inner self in every possible way; but after his 
first struggles and victory every word that remains on 
record seems instinct with a pervading, undoubting, eager 
Christian faith. There was an unconscious sanctity about 
him which was, as it were, the breath of his nostrils ; he 
diffused it as his breath, it was as vital to him as his 
breath. . . . Here was a man, bustling, striving, organ- 
izing, speaking and preaching with the dust and fire of 
the world on his clothes, but carrying his shrine with him 
everywhere." 

Nor is there any question of the purifying effect such 
devoted disciples of Jesus exercise. The touch of so- 
called Christendom on so-called heathendom has been 
often anything but cleansing. An Asiatic seaport, where 
West and East mingle in trade, is invariably more vicious 
than an interior city. In Dr. Schweitzer's volume already 
quoted he mentions finding ruins of abandoned huts on 
the banks of an African stream : " 'When I came out here 
fifteen years ago/ said a trader who stood near me, 'these 
places were all flourishing villages.' 'And why are they 
so no longer?' I asked. He shrugged his shoulders and 
said in a low voice, 'If alcohol' " But these debasing 
group contacts only serve to render more conspicuous the 
influence of genuine Christian individuals. One reads 
in the biography of Li Hung Chang the impression made 



Cleansing 31 

upon that astute Oriental statesman by General Gordon. 
"It is a direct blessing from Heaven/' he says, "the com- 
ing of this British Gordon. He is superior in manner and 
bearing to any of the foreigners whom I have come in 
contact with and does not show outwardly that conceit 
which makes most of them repulsive in my sight." Pro- 
fessor William James, after spending months in reading 
the experiences of religious men and women in prepara- 
tion for his Gifford Lectures, speaks of himself as feeling 
"washed in better moral air." 

A crystal clear brook discontents us with a muddy 
stream, and Christianity renders certain motives unclean 
which would not seem so apart from Christ. But dwellers 
beside discolored rivers are not displeased by their tainted 
hues until they become familiar with a pellucid stream. 
One often hears lamentations over the absence of a sense 
of sin, and the consequent lack of interest in Christianity 
as a means of cleansing. Such bewailers have read little 
history. Mr. Lecky tells us that "no philosopher of an- 
tiquity ever questioned that a good man, reviewing his 
life, might look upon it without shame and even with 
positive complacency." And he adds: "There is no fact 
in religious history more startling than the radical change 
that has in this respect passed over the character of de- 
votion." This change has been due to the coming of the 
Christian conscience with its new sensitiveness to evil. 
If one scans the mass of testimony from many mission 
fields contained in the reports made at the Edinburgh 
Ecumenical Conference of 1910, there is scarcely an in- 
stance of any who have come to Christ burdened with a 
consciousness of iniquity. That consciousness has devel- 



32 What Is There ik Religion? 

oped, if at all, as a result of contact with Him. The 
Spirit of Jesus both creates the sense of evil and provides 
the cleansing. And in that lies its incomparable value for 
social advance. 

Throughout her history the Church has eyed askance 
the realm of amusements, and has frequently condemned 
it as unclean. There have been, and there still are, rea- 
sons for this condemnation. Happily the modern Church 
is learning to discriminate between wholesome and un- 
wholesome recreations, and to recognize that in the sphere 
of amusements the Spirit of Christ exercises a purifying 
touch. Among leaders on the American stage few of the 
last generation stand higher than Edwin Booth. He was 
open-eyed to the debasing character of many theatrical 
performances, and said in a letter to Dr. Lyman Abbott : 
"I never permit my wife or daughter to witness a play 
without previously ascertaining its character." He was 
not afraid to incur serious losses in carrying on his thea- 
ter according to his ideals. When in financial difficulties 
he once wrote a friend: "My disappointment is great, to 
be sure, but I have the consciousness of having tried to do 
what I deemed to be my duty. Since the talent God has 
given me can be made available for no other purpose, I 
believe the object to which I devote it to be worthy of self- 
sacrifice." A clergyman, wishing to attend a play in 
his theater and afraid of the censure of his parishioners, 
had the bad taste to ask him whether he might not be ad- 
mitted to a performance by a side or rear door, and Booth 
replied: "There is no door in my theater through which 
God cannot see." Joseph Jefferson testified that Booth's 
theater was conducted "like a church behind the curtain." 



Cleansing 33 

The wholesale disapproval by Christians of certain forms 
of entertainment is a confession of unbelief in the cleans- 
ing power of the Spirit of Jesus. There is no part of 
the landscape of human life — and certainly not that part 
of it in which millions find keenest pleasure — where the 
stream of religion cannot carry away the polluting filth. 
But there are other parts of the landscape upon which 
Christians have looked with too lax scrutiny, or where 
they have calmly concluded that the cleansing river of the 
Holy Spirit could find no watercourse. We are all agreed 
in condemning sexual sins as unclean, and it is because 
of their stimulus of the sex instinct that many forms of 
amusement have been banned by Christian leaders. The 
New Testament places in the same class with sexual de- 
filements a pervasive spirit in our whole life, which colors 
our point of view and corrupts our motives in every public 
and private issue. Repeatedly in the writings of apostles 
and of the fathers, and in that saying of Jesus quoted 
at the outset, one finds covetousness, the acquisitive spirit, 
classed with "fornication, uncleanness, passion, lustful 
desire. " You may have noticed this in the quotations 
from Justin and Lactantius given a few minutes ago. 
But few among us regard the instinct of acquisition as 
filthy, or the man who is ruled by it as a moral leper. 
From the New Testament viewpoint every business which 
is carried on primarily to make money, every public policy 
which is adopted for our own national enrichment, every 
individual who takes up an occupation or accepts a posi- 
tion with his eye on what he will get from it, is impelled 
by a motive as foul as the sexually lustful. We are chil- 
dren of a holy God, and His holiness is His creative love : 



34 What Is There ik Keligion? 

He does nothing for His own advantage merely, but 
spends Himself that He may add to the beauty of His 
world and the fullness of His children's lives. Who, then, 
are of clean hands and of pure thoughts before Him? 
They only who are impelled by the creative spirit — artists 
who put themselves into their work for love of it and for 
the joy of enhancing earth's loveliness, inventors who add 
to the serviceable possessions of mankind, producers who 
supply goods with a sense of obligation to do their best 
to fill men's needs, workmen of every calling who dedicate 
themselves to their task because they believe it to be a serv- 
ice of the commonwealth. With all such, considerations 
of payment are secondary. The instant fees become fore- 
most in the mind of a physician, or salary in the thought 
of a preacher or professor, or profits in the enterprise of 
a merchant, or dividends in the eyes of an investor, or 
wages in the outlook of any worker, that instant his call- 
ing is sullied and his own heart is soiled. For the honor 
of business the word "commercialized" must be cleaned 
until it no longer is a synonym for "degraded." A British 
economist diagnoses the disease of our present social order 
by entitling a book The Acquisitive Society. As originally 
published in England, its title ran "The Sickness of an 
Acquisitive Society," and the title on our American edi- 
tion is an improvement, both because of its brevity and 
because an acquisitive society cannot be anything but sick. 
By Christian standards acquisitiveness is in the same class 
with sexual disease. We take measures to prevent the 
spread of plagues which have their origin in impurity. 
The Christian conscience demands a prophylactic in our 
industrial life to safeguard workers with head or hand 



Cleansing 35 

against the deadly bacilli of the gain-seeking spirit. Like 
the lustful impulse, it "hardens all within and petrifies 
the feeling." It eats up consciences and rots characters 
as loathsomely as leprosy destroys the tissue of the body. 
Our social order will not be sanitary until it can be fairly 
described from its dominant motive as "The Creative 
Society/' or "The Ministering Society." 

And what a mass of filth has to be washed out before 
that can be! In international relations, such devices as 
preferential or protective tariffs, ship subsidies, the use 
of the diplomatic representatives of governments to ob- 
tain advantages over rivals in trade, the imperialistic de- 
sire to hold some weaker people in subjection for com- 
mercial profit — devices more fundamentally causes of war 
than the possession of huge armaments, for without na- 
tional self-seeking armaments would be robbed of almost 
all danger — must come to be abhorred as smirches on a 
nation's honor. In business life, investments made in 
order to obtain returns irrespective of the service per- 
formed by the investment must be viewed with the disgust 
now felt for the traffic in vice. There is an amazing page 
in Edward Bok's Autobiography on which he tells how as 
a stenographer, in the Western Union Telegraph office at 
195 Broadway, Jay Gould used to dictate his stock orders 
to him ; and how Bok went to his Sunday School teacher, 
a Wall Street broker, with the information of how Gould 
was buying and selling; and how this Sunday School 
teacher bought and sold for his pupil and for himself. In 
the Plymouth Church of that day when Henry Ward 
Beecher was proclaiming a large Gospel, this was appar- 
ently considered by intelligent hearers as quite legitimate, 



36 What Is Theee in Religion? 

while the "New Testament would call such gain-seeking 
filthy covetousness. In education, studies pursued with 
an eye to getting on in the world, the teaching of certain 
views — capitalistic or socialistic, conservative or progres- 
sive — because they please the supporting constituency, 
the exclusion from colleges or schools of the presentation 
of facts which offend some powerful group in the com- 
munity, must be regarded as prostituting institutions ded- 
icated to the fearless and untrammeled pursuit and prop- 
agation of truth. This thorough cleaning which our social 
order requires will not be compassed save as we let the 
Spirit of Christ render consciences sensitive with His 
judgment of filthiness and purity. 

It is a religious cleansing which is indispensable. Still, 
as in the days of Celsus, the ordinary man of the world 
does not believe in the possibility of radical transforma- 
tions of human nature. Only believers in the living God 
expect men to be born again and to show themselves new 
creatures. Professor Hocking recently wrote t "There is 
a kind of official legislative pessimism or resignation, born 
of much experience of the unequal struggle between high 
aspiration and nature, a pessimism found frequently in 
the wise and great from Solomon to this day. . . . The 
world-wise lawgiver will respect the attainable and main- 
tainable level of culture, a level not too far removed from 
the stage of no-effort. . . . How different from this legis- 
lative pessimism is the pessimism of religion. . . . The 
great religions have spoken ill of original human nature ; 
but they have never despaired of its possibilities. ... In 
spite of the revolutionary character of their standards, 
they are still committed to the faith that these standards 



Cleansing 37 

are reachable. . . . Religion declines to limit the moral 
possibility of human nature." The Harvard philosopher 
entitles his believing book Human Nature and Its Re- 
making. Contemporaneously with his lectures appeared 
the last book of a suggestive British thinker, Benjamin 
Kidd, The Science of Power, in which he points out in 
how relatively short a time the whole mind of a people 
can be made over for good or ill, and a social heredity set 
flowing, which shapes the thoughts of the new-born and 
moulds them to the established type. Germany was mili- 
tarized, and Japan was westernized, in a single genera- 
tion. Individually and collectively men are plastic. With 
God the scabbiest moral leper and the most grasping so- 
ciety can be cleansed and renewed with incredible swift- 
ness. That is the heart of the Gospel of Christ. If any 
man or any community be brought under His control, 
there is a new creation : "The old things are passed away ; 
behold, they are become new." 

Men cannot fully believe that there is this cleansing 
power in the Christian religion until they have themselves 
experienced it. They are led to try it through the testi- 
mony of those who have known what it was to be foul and 
then through Christ washed white. A book like Augus- 
tine's Confessions has perennial force because it gives this 
personal witness. Surveying his earlier years, he cries 
out: "O rottenness!" and breaks off from their contempla- 
tion : " 'Tis filthy, I will never give my mind to it. I 
will not so much as look towards it. But Thee I desire, O 
Righteousness and Purity. ... I slid away from Thee, 
and went astray, O my God, yea, too much astray, and I 
became to myself a land of want." From a soiled self 



38 What Is There m Religion? 

that had been to him the far country of harlots, swine 
and hunger, he had been cleaned into a companionable 
child of God. 

Can peach renew lost bloom, 

Or violet lost perfume, 

Or sullied snow turn white as overnight ? 

Man cannot compass it, yet never fear : 

The leper Naaman 

Shows what God will and can. 

God, who worked there, is working here; 

Wherefore let shame, not gloom, betinge thy brow. 

God, who worked then, is working now. 

Penitent shame has begun to flow in Christian hearts 
oftenest when they caught sight of the figure of Jesus. 
None can face Him without feeling himself dirty by 
contrast. "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 
Lord," has been the instinctive utterance of thousands 
since the words first surged to Peter's lips. The cross 
has always made our world appear blackest, for every gen- 
eration knows its own religious traditionalists, commercial 
exploiters, expedient politicians, false friends, unthinking 
mob, indifferent public; and Calvary is no event of the 
past alone, but a present tragedy in which the hands of 
the living are stained with the blood of the Righteous. 
!No men have ever accused themselves with such searching 
sincerity, or felt themselves so smirched by the guilt of 
their community as disciples of the crucified Jesus. John 
Howard, the reformer of prisons, just before his death 
in the Crimea, whither he had gone to investigate the 
plague, writes on the cover of his memorandum book : "I 
think I never look into myself but I find some corruption 



Cleansing 39 

and sin in my heart. . . . Oh, that the Son of God may 
not have died for me in vain!" Their consciences align 
Christians among those who slew Jesus Christ — one with 
Caiaphas and Pilate and Judas in motive and principle. 
And their consciences also charge them with complicity in 
the social guilt of their own day. Clement of Alexandria 
says : "If the neighbors of an elect man sin, the elect man 
has sinned. For had he conducted himself as the Word 
prescribes, his neighbor would also have been filled with 
such reverence for the life as not to sin." 

This sense of being involved in corporate wrong-doing 
has grown stronger among Christians in recent genera- 
tions. When the Fugitive Slave Law was enacted, Emer- 
son declared : "There is infamy in the air. I have a new 
experience, I wake in the morning with a painful sensa- 
tion, which I carry about all day, and which, when traced 
home, is the odious remembrance of that ignominy which 
has fallen on Massachusetts, which robs the landscape 
of beauty, and takes the sunshine out of every hour." 
E. H. Hutton records the sensitiveness of Frederick Deni- 
son Maurice which made him charge himself with every 
iniquity which he found in the life about him : "His con- 
fessions were a kind of litany, poured forth in the name 
of human nature, the weakness and sinfulness of which 
he felt most keenly, most individually, most painfully, 
but which he felt at least as much in the character of the 
representative of a race by the infirmities of which he was 
overwhelmed, as on his own account." This self -reproach- 
ful complicity in the sinful tendencies of the life about 
them is typical of the finest Christian spirits. A keen- 
minded Chinese official, comparing the influence of Jesus 



40 What I* There in Religion? 

with that of Confucius and Buddha and Lao-tse, once said 
to me in Peking: "He seems to have the power to create 
a more delicate conscience." One is aware of its pres- 
ence in those in our generation who take seriously the 
mind of Christ. Caught in judgments like the Great War, 
or faced with the selfishnesses and sordidnesses of our 
peacefulest times, they own : "Woe is me, for I am a man 
of unclean motive, and I dwell in the midst of a people 
of unclean motive, for mine eyes have seen the Lord of 
love, and looked on Him whom we have pierced." In that 
experience of personal and social shame, men are set free 
from soiling self-interest and made passionate enthusiasts 
for the reign of brotherhood. In contact with Christ they 
are disgraced and reborn. 

We return to the metaphor with which we began — the 
Hudson Eiver cleaning those who bathe in its waters and 
bearing the filth of a thronged city into the salt ocean. 
The Spirit of God touches men like the moving current 
of a great stream. "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger 
and clamor and railing be put away from you with all 
malice" — Paul's words suggest an outbearing current re- 
moving this moral sewerage, if men will allow it to be 
carried off. And his next sentence easily connects itself 
with a picture of the cleaned streets of a wholesome city 
where children of God dwell together in spiritual health : 
"And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving 
each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you." Men 
have found this cleansing in religion. They have confi- 
dently prayed, as individuals and as nations: "Wash me, 
and I shall be whiter than snow." 



CHAPTER III 

POWEB 

ALONG part of the course of the Hudson River mills 
are built and the stream is employed as a source 
of power. Human force is multiplied many times 
by the force of the current, and what would be impossible 
for the physical strength of man is done easily with the 
assistance of the river. The commonest of all religious 
experiences is the discovery that power results from faith 
in God. 

The Bible is full of acknowledgments by believers of 
this reinforcement. An early warrior sings: "By Thee 
I run upon a troop, and by my God do I leap over a wall." 
Another psalmist gives as a repeatedly verified experience : 
"Twice have I heard this : that power belongeth unto God." 
A shrinking prophet faces single-handed a whole people 
with the divine Voice ringing in his soul: "I have made 
thee a fortified city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls." 
A Christian apostle, who to spread the sway of Jesus has 
inured himself to hardship and loss, and learned self- 
control when success smiled upon him, declares: "I can 
do all things in Him that strengthened me." Old Testa- 
ment believers heard the challenge : "Is anything too hard 
for the Lord ?" Jesus premised His prayer with the con- 
fession of confidence : "Abba, Father, all things are pos- 
sible unto Thee" ; and He passed on to His followers an 
assurance which made them say again and again: "God 

41 



42 What Is There ii* Religion? 

is able — able to guard you from stumbling, able to make 
all grace abound, able to do exceeding abundantly." The 
biographers of Jesus repeatedly call attention to His ex- 
traordinary force: His word is with power; He does 
mighty works; He is aware of limitless resources — "the 
Father abiding in Me doeth His works." The God of 
Christian faith is not sheer might; He is love; but His 
love is wise, and has all the forces of the universe at its 
disposal. The supreme instance of the might of God is 
the triumph of Jesus over the combination of forces which 
massed themselves to end His career and succeeded in 
crucifying and burying Him, only to find Him a more 
potent living Factor both in their own and succeeding 
centuries. "When Paul wants a measure for the force of 
God, he speaks of "the exceeding greatness of His power 
to usward who believe, according to that working of the 
strength of His might which He wrought in Christ, when 
He raised Him from the dead." Christian faith estab- 
lishes a connection with One whose love is incalculably 
capable. 

Man is pitted against three antagonists which seem too 
strong for him — the physical universe, the mass of his 
fellow-mortals, and himself. 

(1) The physical universe. He has to sustain himself 
in the midst of, by, and against the world of nature. He 
must fight to keep alive — fight against heat and cold, dis- 
ease and danger. He must subdue beasts and soil, and 
make them support him. He must investigate and try 
to conquer such forces as electricity and bacilli. He wages 
a losing battle, for in three score years and ten more or 
less the physical universe appears to win and to reduce 



Power 43 

his body to dust. Instinctively he reaches out for an in- 
visible Ally; and, from the most primitive believer, who 
fortified himself with a magical charm, to Jesus of Naza- 
reth commending His spirit to a Father's hands, he has 
felt himself strengthened. 

Psychologists have investigated the latent force in man's 
instinctive emotions, and have taught us how these are 
made dangerous by repression or paralyzed by inhibiting 
notions. There is no more emancipating idea than that 
on which Jesus laid such constant stress — that this physi- 
cal universe is God's world, that its forces are not foes but 
friends of His sons and daughters, that man can use every 
one of them for his advantage. Paul summed up the 
Master's teaching in the statement : "All things are yours : 
the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things 
to come; all are yours." Those who possess this faith 
are freed from fear — the most serious of inhibitions. In 
their religious life they are daily renewed with the sug- 
gestion of power. Physiologists tell us that the mind be- 
comes fatigued much sooner than the body, so that a faith 
which strengthens our confidence enables us to put forth 
much more physical energy. A British neurologist re- 
ports an experiment on three men under hypnosis, in which 
a suggestion of weakness lowered their strength to almost 
one-fourth of their normal average, while a suggestion of 
power increased it by more than a third. Christian faith 
enables its possessors to become whole men physically, to 
release as much as in them is. And Christian believers 
would not be willing to limit their available powers by 
those which any physicist could list as within them. They 
refuse to draw a sharp line between the Within and the 



44 What Is There in Religion? 

Beyond ; for them there is a door between, which they be- 
lieve can be opened. The resources in themselves are not 
merely human, for God is within; and God to whom be- 
longs the universe can replenish and supplement the avail- 
able stock out of an exhaustless store. Pitted against the 
odds of the physical universe, they are confident that all 
that God asks of them they can rely on Him to supply. 

In the note-books of Henry M. Stanley there are strik- 
ing testimonials to the worth of religion to a man con- 
fronting the perilous forces of a savage continent: 

"On all my expeditions, prayer made me stronger, mor- 
ally and mentally, than my non-praying companions. It 
did not blind my eyes, or dull my mind, or close my ears ; 
but, on the contrary, it gave me confidence. It did more, 
it gave me joy and pride in my work, and lifted me hope- 
fully over the one thousand five hundred miles of forest 
tracks, eager to face the day's perils and fatigues. . . . 
Civilized society rejoices in the protection afforded it by 
strong-armed law. Those in whom faith in God is strong 
feel the same sense of security in the deepest wilds. An 
invisible Good Influence surrounds them, to whom they 
appeal in distress, an Influence which inspires noble 
thoughts, comfort in grief, and resolution when weakened 
by misfortune. I imperfectly understand this myself, 
but I have faith and believe. ... By prayer, the road 
sought for has become visible, and the danger immediately 
lessened, not once or twice or thrice, but repeatedly, until 
the cold unbelieving heart was impressed." 

But the physical universe sooner or later presents man 
with the inevitable. He may face it in one of five ways : — 
He may revolt, and be sent to his grave "like a quarry 
slave at night scourged to his dungeon." He may try to 



Power 45 

cheat the universe by taking his own life, finding a pose 
of power in substituting for its mode of execution one 
which he chooses for himself. He may attempt a frac- 
tional suicide by dulling his sensibilities with drink or 
drugs. He may face it with the grim effort of will of the 
Stoic or the Red Indian. Or he may accept it as the will 
of a wise and loving Father. Christian faith condemns 
revolt and suicide, whether total or partial. One evan- 
gelist tells us that Jesus declined the drugged drink which 
humane custom provided for victims en route to cruci- 
fixion. He seemed to say : 

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore, 

And bade me creep past. 
"No I let me taste the whole of it. 

Christianity is altogether different from Stoicism in its 
attitude to the universe, but many a Christian tends to 
stop with Stoicism. There are few more heroic figures 
in the annals of English literature than that of Sir Walter 
Scott, when suddenly upon his career of uninterrupted 
prosperity came, through no fault of his, the failure of the 
publishing house in which he was financially involved, 
the death of a dearly loved grandson and the death of his 
wife. Scott left the house he loved, saw his cherished be- 
longings taken away for sale, sat down day after day and 
forced himself to write in order to pay off his creditors, 
and battled manfully with his own depression. Here 
is a typical entry in his diary: 

"Worked in the morning as usual, and sent off the 
proofs and copy. Something of the black dog still hang- 



46 What Is There in Religion? 

ing about me ; but I will shake him off. I generally affect 
good spirits in company of my family, whether I am en- 
joying them or not. It is too severe to sadden the harm- 
less mirth of others by suffering your own causeless melan- 
choly to be seen; and this species of exertion is, like vir- 
tue, its own reward; for the good spirits, which are at 
first simulated, become at length -real." 

God forbid that one should speak slightingly of a strug- 
gle so honorably fought; but it is singular that one as 
punctiliously religious in outward observances should have 
fought it apparently alone. When Lady Scott lies slowly 
dying, he enters: 

"The same scene of hopeless (almost) and unavailing 
anxiety. Still welcoming me with a smile, and asserting 
she is better. I fear the disease is too deeply entwined 
with the principles of life. Still laboring at this Review, 
without heart or spirits to finish it. I am a tolerable Stoic, 
but preach to myself in vain." 

And he transcribes two lines from Shakespeare's King 
Henry the Fourth: 

Are these things then necessities? 
Then let us meet them like necessities. 

Possibly Scott's reticence made him diffident in express- 
ing religious faith even in his diary; but he seems to be 
forcing himself to bear up by sheer power of will, and 
pathetically he owns that the struggle leaves him "har- 
dened." It is a long way from the acquiescence of Geth- 
semane: "The cup which the Father giveth Me, shall 
I not drink it?" 



Power 47 

Henri Amiel, professor in the Academy of Geneva, 
acute student of art, literature and philosophy, consults 
his physician and is told that an incurable malady is upon 
him, that he must look forward to rapidly waning strength, 
and after some months or years to death. Next morning 
he writes in his Journal: 

"On waking it seemed to me that I was staring into the 
future with startled eyes. Is it indeed to me that these 
things apply? Incessant and growing humiliation, my 
slavery becoming heavier, my circle of action steadily 
narrower! . . . It is difficult for the natural man to es- 
cape from a dumb rage against inevitable agony." 

He asks himself the possible explanations of the universe : 
an indifferent nature? a Satanic principle of things? a 
good and just God ? As he thinks them over, the Chris- 
tion interpretation grips his mind : 

"Righteousness consists in willingly accepting one's lot, 
in submitting to and espousing the destiny assigned us, 
in willing what God commands, in renouncing what He 
forbids us, in consenting to what He takes from us or 
refuses us." 

And the entry in the journal concludes : 

"Health cut off means marriage, travel, study and work 
forbidden or endangered. It means life reduced in at- 
tractiveness and utility by five-sixths. Thy will he done!" 

In a previous chapter we quoted Mr. Birrell's remark 
on the religion of Charlotte Bronte. It may be true that 
she had not enough faith to give her enjoyment; but she 



48 What Is There in Religion? 

had enough to give her splendid power. After her sister 
Emily's death, and with Anne dying of the same incurable 
disease, this brilliant woman, condemned to the loneliest 
of existences with her old father in Haworth rectory on 
the bleak Yorkshire moors, writes to her closest friend: 

"I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep 
looking upward. This is not the time to regret, dread, or 
weep. What I have and ought to do is very distinctly 
laid out for me ; what I want, and pray for, is strength 
to perform it. The days pass in a slow, dark march ; the 
nights are the test ; the sudden wakings from restless sleep, 
the revived knowledge that one lies in her grave, and an- 
other not at my side, but in a separate and sick bed. 
However, God is over all." 

An even more triumphant instance of the power which 
Christian faith supplies in the face of an overwhelming 
blow from the physical universe is given in Dr. John 
Brown's account of the way in which his sainted father 
took his wife's death: 

"On the morning of the 28th May 1816, my eldest sis- 
ter, Janet, and I were sleeping in the kitchen-bed with 
Tibbie Meek, our only servant. We were all three awak- 
ened by a cry of pain — sharp, insufferable, as if one were 
stung. . . . We all knew whose voice it was, and, in our 
night-clothes, we ran into the passage, and into the little 
parlor to the left hand, in which was a closet-bed. We 
found my father standing before us, erect, his hands 
clenched in his black hair, his eyes full of misery and 
amazement, his face white as that of the dead. He 
frightened us. He saw this, or else his intense will had 
mastered his agony, for, taking his hands from his head, 
he said, slowly and gently, 'Let us give thanks/ and 



Power 49 

turned to a little sofa in the room ; there lay our mother, 
dead." 

In these instances we have men and women confronting 
the universe in its most menacing and hostile aspects, and 
finding in religion force to face circumstances bravely^ and 
to acquiesce with thankfulness in that which at the time 
is breaking their hearts. 

(2) The mass of our fellow-mortals. Every earnest 
man has to follow a lonely way in face of the criticism of 
many and the opposition of some, and with the drag of 
the uncaring ignorance of the majority of those about 
him. Here and there stalwart spirits fall back on them- 
selves and hold their course in resolute solitude. But in 
such isolation almost invariably they are driven, even 
despite their own reluctant unbelief, to feel after invisible 
Comradeship. And then the power of faith is manifested. 

For years Louis Pasteur strove in the interest of truth 
and humanity, against the medical profession and the 
overwhelming majority of his fellow-scientists, to have his 
theory of the spread of infection by germs applied prac- 
tically. It was a long and almost solitary struggle against 
stupidity, pride and professional jealousy. When at the 
close of his career he was elected to the Academy, at a 
time when expressions of personal religion were most un- 
common in such circles, he took occasion in his inaugural 
address to pay homage to the sense of a Power beyond 
man's : 

"Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an 
ideal, and who obeys it; ideal of art, ideal of science, 
ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great 



50 What Is There in Religion? 

thoughts and great actions ; they all reflect light from the 
Infinite." 

Pasteur had an English contemporary who would have 
regretted that his faith was not more explicitly evangelical 
and orthodox, but whose own battle through a lifetime on 
behalf of the oppressed — factory-operatives, chimney- 
sweeps, lunatics, children enslaved in industry — was akin 
to the struggle of the French man of science. Lord Ash- 
ley (more familiarly known by his later title as Earl of 
Shaftesbury) confided to a diary such reflections as these : 

"Engaged more than ever: small works compared with 
the political and financial movements of the day — a Lodg- 
ing-House, a Ragged School, a Vagrant Bill, a Thieves' 
Refuge! No wonder that people think me as small as 
my work ; and yet I would not change it. Surely God has 
called me to the career. 

" With all your experience' (I imagine some young 
man saying to me) 'would you counsel me to follow the 
career that you have chosen and pursued?' In the first 
place, I reply that, in spite of all vexations, disappoint- 
ments, rebuffs, insults, toil, self-denial, expense, weariness, 
sickness, all loss of political position, and considerable 
loss of estimation — in spite of being always secretly de- 
spised and often publicly ignored — in spite of having 
your 'evil' most maliciously and ingeniously exaggerated, 
and your 'good' 'evil spoken of,' I would for myself say, 
'Yes.'" 

Throughout the diary after some speech which he had 
anticipated with dread and which went off better than he 
had dared to hope, after some unexpected support for his 
measures from leaders in Parliament, after a vote which 
set forward the cause even if for the time being the bill 



Power 51 

he wanted was not passed, he inserts: "Non nobis, Do- 



mine/ 9 



Here are men who found their religion a reinforcement 
against the pressure of fellow-mortals indifferent or hos- 
tile to their cherished ideals. 

There are dozens of men and women, younger and 
older, in our commercial enterprises asking themselves 
whether Christian principles can be made to work in 
modern business. They may need to be reminded that 
no sentiment, however lofty, can be expected to act as a 
substitute for sound judgment and unflagging industry. 
They may also be told that the current acquisitive motives 
are not working in such fashion that present business 
conditions can be viewed with complacency. But they 
must recall that the Gospel does not offer mere principles 
which men must put into operation, but the Spirit of love 
which is the Spirit of power. The Christian religion 
stands or falls with the practicability of this Spirit. It 
asserts that the mind of Jesus is the mind of the Lord of 
earth and heaven, that to work by methods at variance 
with that mind is to court certain disaster and to im- 
poverish one's soul, that to be ruled by His mind is to 
encounter criticism, mockery, enmity — a repetition in 
some sort of Calvary — and inevitably to know the power 
of His victory. 

There are hundreds of wistful spirits the world over 
looking for a readjustment of international relations on a 
basis of brotherhood which will render impossible a re- 
currence of the tragedy of war. They feel the pressure 
of the opposition which invariably develops when even 
the most moderate steps towards an organization for 



52 What Is There in Religion? 

world-friendship are undertaken. They know the cyn- 
icism which has succeeded the eager idealism of a few 
years ago. They see the same factors alive and aggressive 
which brought on the terrible catastrophe. They confront 
the dilemma of pessimism or religious faith. Those who 
choose the latter are the spirits with force enough to bring 
to the birth the new era, with which the world is now 
travailing. 

(3) Man fights with himself. Each one knows himself 
a house divided. It is not merely a conflict of the physical 
and the spiritual, but a civil war in the spirit itself. The 
most placid of saints confess their consciousness of an in- 
ward warfare, and the vast majority of believers tell of a 
battle to the death. The struggle seems usually more 
acute in religious than in irreligious natures; for in the 
latter the spiritual nature is itself dormant ; but the for- 
mer speak of conquest. They have opened their hearts 
in trust and let in reinforcements against their baser 
selves. In the conclusion of his study of The Varieties 
of Religious Experience, Professor William James says 
that "higher energies filter in." The combat between the 
good that a man would and the .evil that he would not do, 
wringing the anguished exclamation : "Wretched man that 
I am ! who shall deliver me ?" ends successfully with those 
who can say: "I thank God through Jesus Christ our 
Lord." 

'Not to dwell upon the grosser passions and hideous 
selfishness from which believers look to God to wash 
them white, take the timidity which inhibits usefulness. 
When young John Calvin was a student in Paris, and just 
beginning to break with the traditional Eoman interpreta- 



Power 53 

tion of Christianity, he suddenly discovered fellow-stu- 
dents and other inquiring folk turning to him for guid- 
ance : 

"I was quite surprised to find that before a year elapsed 
all who had any desire after purer doctrines were con- 
tinually coming to me to learn, although I myself was 
but a novice and a tyro. Being of a disposition somewhat 
unpolished and bashful which led me to love retirement, 
I then began to seek some corner where I might be with- 
drawn from public view; but so far from being able to 
accomplish the object of my desire, all retreats were like 
public schools. In short, whilst my one great object was 
to live in seclusion without being known, God so led me 
out through different turnings and changes that He never 
permitted me to rest in one place, until in spite of my 
natural disposition He brought me forth into public 
notice." 

And there is a tradition that this shy and hesitant scholar, 
apprehensive of the conflict ahead, scarcely knowing 
whither his thoughts were taking him, used to conclude 
these early addresses on religious themes with the words : 
"If God be for us, who can be against us ?" Religion was 
his reliance to down the inhibitions of bashfulness. 

Many discover a worse inward enemy in worry, which 
robs them of sleep, darkens their days, and more than 
halves their efficiency. On March 3rd, 1843, after a long 
effort which had left him with less than a dollar in his 
pocket, Samuel F. B. Morse sat in the gallery of the Sen- 
ate Chamber in Washington anxiously waiting for the 
passage of a Telegraph Bill, which would insure the put- 
ting into operation of his invention for the transmission 
of messages by wire. As the hands of the clock drew 



54 What Is There in Religion? 

towards midnight on that last evening of an expiring 
Congress, he consulted two senatorial friends on the prob- 
ability of the bill's being reached before the close of the 
session, and they could only bid him prepare to be dis- 
appointed. "In this state of mind," he writes to a friend, 
"I retired to my chamber and made all my arrangements 
for leaving Washington the next day. Painful as was 
this prospect of renewed disappointment, you, my dear 
sir, will understand me when I say that, knowing from 
experience whence my help must come in any difficulty, I 
soon disposed of my cares, and slept as quietly as a child." 
!N*ext morning at breakfast he was called out of the hotel 
dining-room, and to his extreme astonishment told that 
the bill had passed. But if it had not been reached, with 
a good night's rest behind him, Morse would have been 
ready for the next effort. Christian faith equipped him 
with the valuable power of disposing of care. 

Students of psychology have been opening up for us the 
abysses of human personality, and pointing out the dan- 
gers that lurk in repressed or misdirected impulses, no- 
tably the sex-impulse. A certain school of psycho-analysts 
carry back almost all mental and moral ills to some faulty 
treatment of this primary instinct. Whether their diag- 
nosis be altogether correct or not, Christian faith and con- 
secration can sublimate the impulse and transmute it into 
a creative force for the highest social well-being. The 
conversion of the instincts sets free the reservoir of latent 
power in man's subconscious life, and opens up his per- 
sonality to fresh inspirations from the life of God. To re- 
vert to our metaphor of the Hudson, religion changes the 
nature of a man from a stagnant pool, in which all manner 



Power 56 

of noxious infections breed, into a river flowing out in 
acts of ministry and replenished with new supplies from 
the lofty mountains of God. It is not without significance 
that the health-commissioner of one of our largest cities 
recently called together a group of religious leaders and 
asked their cooperation in dealing with drug-addicts. He 
brought with him a number of physicians who had spe- 
cialized in the treatment of these cases, and the burden of 
their speech was that apart from religious renewal they 
were unable to point to permanent cures. Here is a pa- 
thetic class of men and women, who long to be delivered 
from their own craving, for whom the only certain relief 
and rescue seems to lie in the power of faith. 

In this discussion of religion as a source of power, it is 
well to remind ourselves that there are two types of 
strength: there is the strength of the steel bridge over 
which a heavy train pounds its way, while the 
girders resist the shock and strain; there is the 
strength of the locomotive which draws the train at a 
steady speed. There is the strength of the river which 
bears up a heavy vessel, and the strength of its cur- 
rent which sweeps such a vessel towards the sea. Be- 
lieving men find both forms of strength in religion — the 
power of patience by which they endure the intolerable, 
and the power of perpetual moral motion. They find in 
God both the passive and the active strength. Isaiah pos- 
sessed and tried to give his contemporaries in Judah 
quietness and confidence. Paul said of a tottering weak 
brother: "The Lord hath power to make him stand." 
Jesus, "when He was reviled, reviled not again." Water 
has a stalwart resistance to pressure, and faith beareth 



56 What Is There in Religion? 

and endureth all things. Another prophet pictures the 
believing exiles on their march across the desert to their 
homeland mounting upon wings, running, walking — al- 
ways moving towards their goal. New Testament Chris- 
tians found the energizing Spirit of Christ within them 
an unfailing inspiration to tireless effort. Steadfastness 
and energy — the power to keep still and the power to 
keep going — these men discover in religion. 

In a sense, as was suggested in a previous chapter, re- 
ligion makes life much harder, because it faces believers 
with the impossible — with the Christlike. Many people 
manage to get along without the reinforcements of religion 
because for themselves and for their community they aim 
at goals well within their powers. To them the message 
that force is to be found from contact with the Unseen is 
without interest. They may even think it a sign of weak- 
ness, unworthy of self-respecting men, to go begging for 
assistance from any one. But the Christian is haunted 
with a tantalizing ideal to which he cannot attain. He 
must stand as much, and bear it as acquiescently, as Jesus. 
He must spend himself as ungrudgingly and with a like 
outgo of love. The more seriously he takes the ideal of 
Jesus, the more painfully aware he is that he comes no- 
where near its achievement. He must either give up in 
desperation or turn for aid to One who is able unto the 
uttermost. We were speaking a moment ago of Calvin. 
When he first established the reformed faith in Geneva, a 
certain offender against Biblical moral standards, who 
was cited to appear before the Council, sent the naive 
message that he was prepared to agree to the articles of 
the Confession of Faith, but that he could not take any 



Power 57 

oath about the Ten Commandments of God "because they 
are very difficult to keep." It is the difficulty of the New 
Testament interpretation of what God requires of us and 
our community which compels us to go to Him for re- 
inforcement. 

And what a picture a river, like our Hudson, is of Divine 
power ! A dam might be erected which would check that 
flow of water for a brief space, but no matter how high the 
obstruction might be built, the water would continue to 
pile up behind it, until at length it poured over the top, 
or forced a way around it, or by its sheer weight broke 
through the dam. A loving God may be delayed. Men 
may set up barriers against His purpose in our world ; they 
may hold fast the entrances of their own hearts. But 
sooner or later, over, or around, or through, He comes. 
Have we not seen it in human affairs? Have we not 
known it in our own experiences? 

"When a river is employed to supply power, men rarely 
set their water-wheels in the broad stream. The current 
is contracted into a mill-race. Has not God done some- 
thing analogous to that in His Self-expression in Jesus ? 
Has He not focussed and made available His power? 
Jesus used the metaphor of contraction when He said of 
His death : "How am I straitened till it be accomplished !" 
The figure of Jesus, and especially of Jesus as crucified, 
is in every generation the point where men are connected 
with the flow of Divine might. George Tyrrell wrote: 
"Again and again I have been tempted to give up the 
struggle, but always the figure of that strange Man hang- 
ing on the cross sends me back to my task again." Samuel 
Butler, who delighted in sneering at Christianity, once 



58 What Is There in Religion? 

set down in a note-book: "There will be no comfortable 
and safe development of our social arrangements — I mean 
we „hall not get infanticide and the permission to suicide, 
nor cheap and easy divorce — till Jesus Christ's ghost has 
been laid." He added sarcastically: "And the best way 
to lay it is to be a moderate churchman." Christ sets the 
ideal and has power to force men to try to attain it. 

And when He lays hold of a life, He narrows it into 
a mill-race. Like Himself, His disciples are wonderfully 
broadened in the range of their sympathies, but they are 
restricted to a single purpose. Paul used the word which 
a Greek would have employed for the confining of water 
in a sluice: "The love of Christ constraineth me." His 
followers feel themselves hemmed in. Every activity of 
their lives has to be in line with the aim for which Jesus 
lived and died, as the mill-race parallels the course of the 
stream. And through a man's life so narrowed and set 
power flows. The concentrated man accomplishes what 
nobody fancied he had it in him to do. And they were 
quite right: he hadn't it in Mm. "I labored more abun- 
dantly (our English word is derived from the flow of water 
wave on wave — ah unda), yet not I, but the grace of God 
that was with me." 

Here and there along the Hudson one comes upon a 
disused mill-race. Usually there is water in it, and a 
superficial glance might not disclose that the race was 
not in operation. But closer inspection shows that the 
water is stagnant; the mill-race has become a standing 
ditch. And there are not a few lives of which it is a pic- 
ture. A 2sTew Testament writer speaks of some in his day 
as "holding the form of godliness, but having denied the 



Power 59 

power thereof." They are often members of the Church; 
they are apparently interested in good things ; their lives 
seem to be parallel with the purpose of God in the world ; 
they are not empty of inspirations. But those inspirations 
are not flowing out and in. They are the remainders of 
the water of life from past connections through an inher- 
ited faith or an earlier devoutness. Their parents had 
first-hand contact with God, or in their own childhood there 
was an open passageway into their souls from Him. The 
mill-wheel may still be in place and an old factory stand- 
ing beside the stream; but the wheel is not turning, and 
nothing is produced in that factory for the spiritual 
enrichment of mankind. The upper-end of the mill-race 
is clogged. Preoccupation with many things has put God 
out of mind ; prayer is forgotten, or has become a perfunc- 
tory routine; there is no commitment of self to God day 
by day in trustful dependence. Theirs is a form of re- 
ligion without its power. The bed of the mill-race attests 
what it has been. The pathos of an impotent Christian is 
a reminder of what was once planned ; — yes, and of what 
may still be, if the connection be reopened ; for that gives 
power : "I labor, striving according to His working which 
worketh in me mightily." 



CHAPTEK IV 

ILLUMINATION 

IN that section of its course where the Hudson is used 
as a source of power, one frequently sees the force 
of the stream transmuted into an electric current, to 
furnish light for towns and villages. Men of practically 
all faiths have found illumination in their contact with 
God. 

The pages of the Bible are full of this experience. "The 
Lord is my light," one of the psalmists begins. Another 
pictures believers turning their faces Godward, and catch- 
ing and reflecting the glow of dawn: "They looked 
unto Him and were radiant." When Isaiah describes 
what the Spirit of God will mean to the ideal Euler 
of the nation, he stresses his intellectual enlightenment: 
four out of the six nouns in the description have to do 
with the enrichment of intelligence: "The Spirit of wis- 
dom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel, the Spirit 
of knowledge" ; and the first of the four titles applied to 
this Monarch is "Wonderful Counsellor." In the poetry 
and proverbs of the Hebrews, we are told again and again 
that those who trust Jehovah find guidance : "He leadeth 
me in paths of righteousness," "Thou shalt guide me with 
Thy counsel," "In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He 
will direct thy paths," "The path of the righteous is as 
the dawning light, that shineth more and more unto the 

perfect day." One large section of the Biblical literature 

60 



Illumination 61 

represents God as coming to man chiefly as Wisdom. The 
ISTew Testament is even more full than the Old of this ex- 
perience of enlightenment. Paul connects the coming of 
Jesus with the story of the creation, and asserts: "God, 
that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, shined in 
our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory 
of God in the face of Jesus Christ. " John declares that 
"God is light," and introduces his account of Jesus with 
the statement : "The life was the light of men." And on 
Jesus' own lips he records the saying : "I am the light of 
the world: he that followeth Me shall not walk in the 
darkness, but shall have the light of life." The climax 
of the whole Bible is the vision of the city of God, brilliant 
in nightless day, in whose light the nations walk, — a city 
whose illumination is religion, for the glory of God light- 
ens it, and the lamp thereof is the Lamb. 

Both believing and unbelieving men agree that life is a 
puzzling affair. Along with these utterances of enlight- 
enment on the pages of the Bible, one finds as frank ex- 
pressions of bewilderment, and we cannot forget that He 
who spoke of God with the utmost assurance died with a 
question on His lips: "My God, why?" The confident 
Christian, "William Wordsworth, acknowledges 

"the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world," 

and his agnostic admirer, Sir William Watson, agrees 
with him: 

Think not thy wisdom can illume away 
The ancient tanglement of night and day. 



62 What Is There in Beligion? 

Enough to acknowledge both, and both revere: 
They see not clearliest who see all things clear. 

In ordinary conversation few remarks are commoner than : 
"Well, this is a queer world." All our attempts to reach 
an explanation that will carry us suref ootedly through life 
must begin with the recognition of its strangeness and 
oddity. Religious and unreligious alike admit that "it 
is not in man that walketh to direct his steps"; but the 
latter think there is nothing for it but to use the best 
light they possess in themselves and stumble on, while the 
former are confident that even amid the puzzling shadows, 
and often black darkness, it is possible to walk in the 
light and be children of the day. 

For devout men and women, while they may feel them- 
selves hopelessly puzzled, begin with the assertion: "God 
knows." A Greek dramatist places in the mouth of a 
character caught in a harrowing tragedy the line : 

A thought deep in the dark of my mind cleaves to a 
Great Understanding. 

Augustine in his Confessions addresses God as One "in 
whose presence are the causes of all uncertain things and 
. . . . with whom do live the eternal reasons of all those 
contingent chance-medleys, for which we can give no rea- 
son." The unbelieving have frequently used with sarcasm 
the saying "God knows." The Persian skeptic, Omar, 
writes : 

The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes, 
But Bight or Left as strikes the Player goes ; 



Illumination 63 

And He that toss'd thee down into the Field, 
He knows about it all — HE knows — HE knows! 

This singular world has seemed to not a few thoughtful 
persons a grim joke, and the only sound they could fancy 
in the silent skies was ironical laughter. That mood has 
not been altogether lacking among the believing. The 
Old Testament several times ascribes scornful humor to 
the Most High: "He that sitteth in the heavens shall 
laugh." The sayings of Jesus are frequently touched with 
humor. He pokes fun at bigoted ecclesiastics who scrupu- 
lously strain out a gnat and gulp down a camel ; and some 
of His phrases, which over-serious people have taken with 
bald literalism, are playful exaggerations, purposefully 
one-sided to force His listeners to think. A world that is 
queer evokes humor in the Divinest; but it is the light- 
hearted humor of a buoyant spirit, confident that even 
the absurdities of life are being worked out by a Father 
who understands and loves. 

Believers are sure that God knows, but His children, 
however intimate they may become with Him, cannot al- 
ways expect to share His knowledge. An Old Testament 
writer has a suggestive classification when he divides "se- 
cret things" and "things that are revealed"; and he re- 
marks that "the secret things belong unto the Lord our 
God." We are not forbidden to let our curiosity pry into 
them and "press bold to the tether's end allotted to this 
life's intelligence." But when the tether's end is reached, 
and we are brought up with a jerk, and strain and tug as 
we may can get no farther in our thinking, it is surely 
something to be able to say: "This is God's secret." It 
may well be that He would like to tell it to us and cannot, 



64 What Is There m Religion? 

because we are too immature to understand Him. Those 
who have attained closest friendship with Him do not 
speak of Him as secretive. Jesus asserted: "There is 
nothing hid, save that it should be manifested ; neither was 
anything made secret, but that it should come to light. " 
The obscurity of things is God's way of tempting us to 
investigate and of leading us on to more accurate knowl- 
edge — knowledge which is the result of our own discov- 
eries. But whether God cannot, or of purpose does not, 
make plain to us matters which we are dying to know, 
there is at least this in religion, that it enables believers 
"to bear without resentment the divine reserve." Thomas 
Arnold said: "Before a confused and unconquerable dif- 
ficulty my mind reposes as quietly as in possession of a 
discovered truth." In every man's life there are experi- 
ences in which his most inquiring thought and eager 
prayer seem to be answered : "What I do thou knowest not 
now; but thou shalt understand hereafter." In a world 
which to us is inherently puzzling, whether it was meant 
to be so or not, it is much that faith helps us to accept the 
inexplicable with patience and hope. 

And in the whole queer universe nothing is queerer to 
us than ourselves. We agree with Clough: 

What we, when face to face we see 
The Father of our souls, shall be, 
John tells us, doth not yet appear; 
Ah ! did he tell what we are here ? 

In one of Mrs. Humphry Ward's novels, Lady Lucy 
Marsham says to Lady Niton : "I thought, Elizabeth, you 



Illumination 65 

would have tried to understand me." Elizabeth Niton 
shook her head, " There's only your Maker could do that, 
Lucy, and He must be pretty puzzled to account for you 
sometimes." When we are overcome by feelings beyond 
our power to control, when we tremble at disclosures of 
capacities for iniquity within us which we did not suspect 
were there, when our crankiness and stupidity become too 
difficult for us to manage, it is no small matter to be able 
to look up and say : "He knoweth our frame," and to trust 
Him to help us to handle ourselves. "Thy hands have 
made me and fashioned me: give me understanding that 
I may learn Thy commandments." When despite damag- 
ing appearances to the contrary we know that we sincerely 
mean to do right, when we must appeal to our own con- 
sciences against the disapproval of those whom we most 
respect, it is everything to be able to say with Job : "He 
knoweth the way that I take"; and with Simon Peter: 
"Lord, Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that I 
love Thee." 

There are many, many things which we can afford not 
to know; our only concern in this perplexing world is 
to know enough to live usefully. Eeligion assures us 
that even when we do not know where we are going, or 
why events befall us, and walk as in a maze, we may still 
be divinely guided. A prophet sums up a large chapter 
of religious experience when he makes God say: "I will 
bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths 
that they know not will I lead them." Those of us with 
only a little faith, when we survey our past, have borne 
in on us that a Wiser than we has had a hand in our ca- 



66 What Is These in Religion? 

reers. We may not be able to prove it to others; we 
should not care to try, for the facts are too personal to 
divulge; but for ourselves we cannot help feeling that 
there were secret preparations for things as yet years 
ahead, that we were intentionally thwarted here and en- 
couraged there, that the best things which happened us 
came largely without our effort, and sometimes in spite 
of our effort. A man phrased his experience to an in- 
quiring college professor: "God has frequently stepped 
into my life very perceptibly." We conclude with George 
Eliot's Silas Marner, "There's dealings wi' us, there's 
dealings"; with the Quaker, George Fox, we speak of 
"great openings" ; and we say with Robert Louis Steven- 
son: "There stood at the wheel that unknown steersman 
whom we call God." 

An English man of letters has described the career of 
one of his own friends: 



"He had to bear a series of devastating calamities. He 
had loved the warmth and nearness of his home circle 
more deeply than most men, and the whole of it was 
swept away ; he had depended for both stimulus and occu- 
pation upon his artistic work, and the power was taken 
from him at the moment of his highest achievement. His 
loss of fortune is not to be reckoned among his calamities, 
because it was na calamity to him. He ended by finding 
a richer treasure than that he had set out to obtain ; and 
I remember that he said to me once, not long before his 
end, that whatever others might feel about their own lives, 
he could not for a moment doubt that his own had been 
an education of a deliberate and loving kind, and that 
the day when he realized that, when he saw that there 
was not a single incident in his life that had not a deep 



Illumination 67 

and an intentional value for him was one of tlie happiest 
days of his whole existence." 



Now in all this it may seem that religion brings no 
illumination ; it brings only the assurance that we are led 
in the dark. But that is not how it seems to religious 
folk. The French naturalist, Jean Henri Fabre, was 
once asked by a visitor: "Do you believe in God?" To 
which he replied emphatically: "I can't say I believe in 
God; I see Him. Without Him I understand nothing; 
without Him all is darkness. ]STot only have I retained 
this conviction; I have aggravated or ameliorated it, 
whichever you please. You could take my skin from me 
more easily than my faith in God." A similar confession 
is made by a professor of Greek in the Spanish University 
of Salamanca, Don Miguel de TTnamuno, who says: "I 
believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel 
the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intan- 
gible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me ; because 
I possess an inner consciousness of a particular providence 
and of a universal mind that marks out for me the course 
of my destiny." Others who would hesitate to speak of 
"seeing" God, or of possessing this inner consciousness, 
would say that He is "the Master Light of all their see- 
ing." God is an assumption which illumines and inter- 
prets for them an else unintelligible world. In His light 
they see light. One of the leading theological teachers of 
the last generation, Henry B. Smith, said: "My deter- 
mination to seek religion was formed solely in conse- 
quence of my complete persuasion of its reasonableness. 
I did not feel any need of it." While such souls lack the 



68 What Is There in Religion? 

mystic sense which enables them to say that they see God, 
they walk in His brightness, and their experience validates 
for them the assumption which they have made. Their 
illumined way in which they step surefootedly convinces 
them that He whom they have darkly trusted is light. 

Believers never stop with the mere assumption of God's 
existence; they are confident that they can so connect 
themselves with Him that He will lighten their path in 
life. We may illustrate this in two typical instances of 
men who expected and received such illumination. 

The first is an Old Testament story of guidance in one 
of life's most momentous choices — the selection of a wife. 
Abraham and his confidential servant, to whom he entrusts 
the finding of a wife for Isaac, resolve to be led by God, 
and in the narrative there are four steps which were taken 
to secure this leading: 

First, Abraham and the servant determine to follow 
God's will, not their own, in this matter. They wish it to 
be a marriage made in heaven ; and they are confident that 
God wills for Isaac a wife who will share his faith and 
be sympathetic with the purpose to which his life is dedi- 
cated. So the servant is sent where such a woman is likely 
to be found, though it involves a long journey. There is 
no promise of illumination except to the obedient. "Unto 
the upright there ariseth light in the darkness." The 
first requisite in those who would be unerringly led is 
willingness to follow God's will to whatever it may carry 
them. 

Second, the servant puts himself into a receptive atti- 
tude to get guidance. He prays : "O Lord, send me good 
speed this day. Behold I am standing by the fountain of 



Illumination 69 

Waters; and the daughters of the men of the city are 
coming out to draw water." He waits upon God; he 
holds his mind open to divine suggestion. 

There is a story of two of Queen Elizabeth's statesmen, 
that Sir Francis Walsingham, wishing to consult Lord 
Burleigh, had to wait in the latter's office because Bur- 
leigh was in church at prayer. When he came into the 
room, Sir Francis said jocularly that he wished himself 
so good a servant of God as Lord Burleigh, but that he 
had not been at church for some time past. To which 
Burleigh gravely replied: "I hold it meet for us to ask 
God's grace to keep us sound of heart, who have so much 
in our power; and to direct us to our well-doing for all 
the people, whom it is easy for us to injure and ruin ; and 
herein, my good friend, the special blessing seemeth meet 
to be discreetly asked and wisely worn." Prayer for di- 
rection is the unfolding of the mind for the entrance 
of light. 

Third, the servant uses his brains. One might think 
that he abdicates the use of his intelligence by asking for 
a sign : "Let it come to pass, that the damsel to whom I 
shall say, Let down thy pitcher, I pray thee, that I may 
drink ; and she shall say, Drink, and I will give thy cam- 
els drink also ; let the same be she that Thou hast appointed 
for Thy servant Isaac." Had he suggested a sign that was 
no indication of the girl's character; had he said, Let it 
be the girl with dark hair, or with red in her dress, it 
would not have shown that he was testing the girl's na- 
ture; but knowing Isaac's lack of initiative and resource, 
the girl who would both promptly comply with a request 
and of her own accord suggest something additional was 



70 What Is There in Religion? 

the type of ready and self-reliant woman whom Isaac 
needed. The sign was not an attempt of this man's to 
shift responsibility from himself to God, but to let God 
meet and guide his own intelligence. 

There is a similar use of a sign from God in a far- 
reaching decision in our American history. Shortly after 
the battle of Antietam, Mr. Lincoln called his cabinet to- 
gether, and taking up a draft of a proclamation freeing 
the slaves which he had previously submitted, said, "When 
the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined, as soon 
as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a Procla- 
mation of Emancipation such as I thought likely to be 
most useful. I said nothing to any one, but I made the 
promise to myself and" — here he hesitated a little — a to 
my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am 
going to fulfill that promise." "It might be thought 
strange," he added, "that he had in this way submitted 
the disposal of matters, when the way was not clear to his 
mind what he should do. God had decided this question 
in favor of the slaves." Mr. Lincoln was a shrewd judge 
of public opinion, and he was by no means abdicating the 
use of his brains. A decisive victory seemed to him the 
opportune moment to launch this contemplated procla- 
mation. He let God meet his own best judgment. 

Fourth, having put himself in line with God's will, 
having prayed, having used his brains, Abraham's serv- 
ant waits for an inward sense of assurance before he com- 
pletes his decision: "And the man looked steadfastly on 
her, holding his peace, to know whether the Lord had 
made his journey prosperous or not." Those who are 
accustomed to asking God's guidance know the feeling of 



Illumination 71 

being right for which this faithful man was waiting. Fre- 
quently one hears people say: "Everything seemed favor- 
able, but somehow I did not feel satisfied to go on"; or 
"There were many contrary opinions, but I could not get 
away from the sense that it just had to be." One put it 
colloquially: "I had been thinking and praying to see 
my way, and it came over me in a flash; I just had a 
'hunch' that this was God's plan for me." What a differ- 
ence the presence or absence of this assurance makes ! It 
is light versus darkness. 

In 1855 the Earl of Shaftesbury was asked by Lord 
Palmerston to accept office in the Cabinet. "I never was 
in such perplexity in my life," he told a friend. "On one 
side were ranged wife, relations, friends, ambition, influ- 
ence; on the other, my own objections, which seemed 
sometimes to weigh as nothing in comparison with the 
arguments brought against them. I could not satisfy 
myself that to accept office was a divine call ; I was satis- 
fied that God had called me to labor among the poor. 
There was no TJrim and Thummim; no open vision. I 
could do nothing but postpone, and, in doing this, I was 
placing Palmerston in a most awkward position. But 
God interposed for me." And he told how in an uncer- 
tain frame of mind he prepared to go to the Palace to 
meet the Queen with the rest of the cabinet ministers. "I 
never felt so helpless. I seemed to be hurried along with- 
out a will of my own. I went and dressed, and then, while 
I was waiting for the carriage, I went down on my knees 
and prayed for counsel. Then, there was some one at 
the door, as I thought to say that the carriage was ready. 
Instead of that a note, hurriedly written in pencil, was 



72 What Is There in Religion ? 

put into my hands. It was from Palmerston: 'Don't go 
to the Palace/ That was thirty years ago," added the 
Earl, "but I dance with joy at the remembrance of that 
interposition, as I did when it happened." Everything 
seemed to make for his acceptance, but he lacked the sense 
that it was God's will, and waiting, as too few are suf- 
ficiently patient to wait, God's leading came. 

The other instance is that which is supreme for Chris- 
tians — Jesus' search for light which led to His decision 
that the cross was His Father's will for Him. In that 
search, as it is summed up in its final moment in Geth- 
semane, we discover the same four steps so clearly marked 
in the Old Testament example. 

Eirst, He committed Himself to God's purpose, and to 
that alone: "ITot as I will, but as Thou wilt." 

Second, He prayed, holding His mind alert and open 
to admit God's light. ISTot once but three times in the 
Garden He addressed Himself directly to heaven : "O My 
Father." 

Third, He used His judgment as far as His mind could 
take Him. "If it be possible" shows His thought can- 
vassing alternatives, and time after time returning to 
death as the Divine cup for Him. 

Fourth, He waited for the feeling of certainty. How 
else explain the repeated prayer ? The light did not break 
clearly all at once, so He kept on seeking it until the 
shadows dissolved. Matthew's account makes an inter- 
esting interpretative change in the material taken from 
Mark. The latter reads: "Again He went away, and 
prayed, saying the same ivords" But according to the 
first evangelist, He had prayed : "My Father, if it be pos- 



Illumination 73 

sible, let this cup pass away from Me," while the second 
prayer is given : "My Father, if this cup cannot pass away 
from Me except I drink it, Thy will be done." Is not 
this evangelist trying to interpret Jesus as becoming more 
confident each time He knelt that death was the cup as- 
signed Him? "Waiting on God, assurance came. 

What is there in religion to illumine life's perplexities ? 
Is it fanciful to press the picture of our parable of the 
Hudson — a town lighted by an electric current generated 
by the force of the stream? The illumination does not 
abolish night ; all about the town is the enveloping black- 
ness, and only here and there the lights gleam. Life's 
mystery is about those who believe. "We know in part." 
But why lay the accent on "in part ?" Suppose it be night, 
the streets of the town are light enough for its inhabitants 
to walk safely and its homes glow with friendly brightness. 
Suppose our knowledge be partial, still "we know" We 
move along life's puzzling ways illumined by the Spirit 
of Christ and homes and shops and pleasure-places and 
public offices are lit with a kindly light, wherever His 
love glows. 

The current of the river had to be transmuted before 
it gave light, and transmuted by men's skill and labor. 
God's wisdom flows as a river in the experiences of 
the godly of all the ages, in the many-times-tested ex- 
periences preserved in the Bible, most fully in the 
experience of Jesus. This stream of the Divine Spirit 
flows still in our time, and we can gain from present 
occurrences, from books, from the voices of the living, 
from the memories of the dead, hints and intimations 
of God's will for us. But there must be something in 



74 What Is There in Religion? 

us which takes the hint, which sees the light of Christ, 
which appreciates and interprets the wisdom of the 
seers of old. Call it spiritual discernment, the 
intuition of faith, the inward light, or by some other 
name, it is the Spirit of God formed in us. The light 
which is latent in God's presence has to he transmuted into 
enlightened eyes in our hearts. Here is the process of 
transmutation — commitment to God's purpose in Christ, 
minds held by prayer receptive to His suggestion, intel- 
ligence actively thinking out the most Christlike course 
available, self-controlled waiting for assurance. Obvi- 
ously the process does not need to be consciously repeated 
with every decision. When the electric light is once in- 
stalled, householders are not aware of the part played by 
the Hudson in generating the current when they press a 
button and turn on a light. Believers who establish re- 
lations with the living God have in themselves the mind 
of Christ. But when for some reason the illumination 
seems dim, the authorities of the electric company investi- 
gate the connections. The transmuting process must be 
in such operation that the light shines where its illumina- 
tion is required. Believers must go over their contacts 
with God sufficiently often to make sure that within them 
is the brightness which lit up the path of Christ: "If a 
man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because the light is 
not in him." "If therefore thine eye be single, thy 
whole body shall be full of light." 



CHAPTER V 

FERTILITY 

IN" the valley through which the Hudson River flows 
the countryside is more fertile — meadows are richer, 
foliage more luxuriant, orchards more fruitful, crops 
more abundant — because of the presence of this body of 
running water with its unfailing supply of moisture. 
There is a like result in human life from the stream of 
inspirations in man's intercourse with the living God. 

This picture of a river with fruitful trees along its 
banks meets us repeatedly in the Bible. "Blessed is the 
man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose trust the Lord 
is," says Jeremiah. "For he shall be as a tree planted by 
the waters, that spreadeth out its roots by the river, and 
shall not fear when heat cometh, but its leaf shall be green ; 
and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither 
shall cease from yielding fruit." The First Psalm bor- 
rows this simile in describing the godly as "a tree planted 
by the streams of water, that bringeth forth its fruit in 
its season, whose leaf also doth not wither." When 
Ezekiel portrays a river emerging from the temple — 
symbol of the spiritual influence of the center of worship 
— he writes : "By the river upon the bank thereof, on this 
side and on that side, shall grow every tree for food, whose 
leaf shall not wither, neither shall the fruit thereof fail ; 
it shall bring forth new fruit every month, because the 
waters thereof issue out of the sanctuary; and the fruit 

thereof shall be for food, and the leaf thereof for healing." 

75 



76 What Is There ik Eeligion? 

The seer on Patmos incorporated that description into his 
vision of the holy city, where beside the crystal clear water 
grows the tree of life, with its twelve crops of fruit and 
its leaves for the healing of the nations. Another psalm- 
ist sings the flourishing lives of those planted in the fertile 
courts of the house of God : "They shall still bring forth 
fruit in old age; they shall be full of sap and green. " 

Jesus stresses fruitfulness as a result of true faith, 
but, instead of the metaphor of a river which moistens the 
soil, He prefers that of seed. Is it fanciful to suggest 
that He felt that human nature needed not only watering, 
but the introduction of new elements, if it were to 
bear a divine harvest? He speaks of Himself as the 
Vine and His disciples as grafted branches, of His 
word as falling on various soils with various results, of 
Himself as planted seed, dying in the ground and certain 
to be not without much fruit. St. Paul lists the crops to 
be expected where the Spirit of Jesus is sown in human 
hearts. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long- 
suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self- 
control." 

The early exponents of the Christian faith did not hesi- 
tate to point to its results in character and conduct as the 
chief evidence of its value. Typical of many similar state- 
ments is that made by the converted Athenian philosopher, 
Athenagoras, to the Emperors Aurelius and Commodus, 
about 177 A.D. : "Among us you will find uneducated per- 
sons, and artisans, and old women, who if they are unable 
in words to prove the benefit of our doctrine, yet by their 
deeds exhibit the benefit arising from their persuasion of 
its truth: they do not rehearse speeches, but exhibit good 



Fertility 77 

works." Both friendly and unfriendly historians of the 
spread of Christianity ascribe a large measure of its suc- 
cess to the good and useful people it produced. Readers 
of Walter Pater will put beside the statement of Athen- 
agoras his imaginative account of the first Christian cere- 
mony at which Marius was present in the Lararium of 
the Cecilian Villa at Rome, and saw "the wonderful spec- 
tacle of those who believed." 

"The people here collected might have figured as the 
earliest handsel or pattern of a new world, from the very 
face of which discontent had passed away. . . . Was 
some credible message from beyond 'the flaming rampart 
of the world' — a message of hope regarding the place of 
men's souls and their interest in the sum of things — al- 
ready moulding anew their very bodies, and looks, and 
voices, now and here ? At least there was a cleansing and 
a kindling flame at work in them, which seemed to make 
everything else Marius had ever- known look vulgar and 
mean." 

Nor need we turn our eyes backwards across many 
centuries to catch sight of the fruits of the Spirit of 
Christ. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his volume on the 
South Seas, paints a portrait of a native Christian in 
whom faith had been "highly fructifying." &e speaks 
of Maka, an Hawaiian evangelist in the Gilbert Islands, 
as "the best specimen of the Christian hero that I have 
ever met." 

"He had saved two lives at the risk of his own; like 
Nathan, he had bearded a tyrant in the hour of blood; 
when a whole white population fled, he alone stood to his 
duty ; and his behavior under domestic sorrow with which 



78 What Is There in Eeligion? 

the public has no concern filled the beholder with sympathy 
and admiration. A poor little smiling laborious man he 
looked; and yon would have thought he had nothing in 
him but that of which he had too much — facile good na- 
ture." 

And not only in transfigured individuals, but in the fam- 
ily-life, the social customs, the public spirit, of trans- 
formed communities, the stream of the Christian faith 
evidences its fertilizing presence. 

It may be worth our while to dwell a moment upon 
the distinction between religion as something useful and as 
something fruitful. In our day almost everything is ap- 
praised by what it can do, and do forthwith. The value 
of a church is apt to be computed by the number of help- 
ful services which the organization renders to the neigh- 
borhood. Sunday School teaching and sermons are meas- 
ured by their immediate effects — by what they induce 
younger and older hearers to go out and attempt. But 
the Bible does not apply this utilitarian standard to re- 
ligion. Men do not at once notice the connection between 
the fertility of the Hudson Valley and the river which 
flows through it. The moisture which enriches fields 
and gardens comes circuitously through the atmosphere 
from the water in the stream. The work of the church 
does not consist to any great extent in the activities 
which can be listed as its ministry to the community; 
they are never more than a small fraction of its con- 
tribution. Its main output is in men, women and chil- 
dren, whose thoughts, sympathies and consciences it has 
helped to grow towards Christlikeness, and in the re- 
sults of their lives through many years in homes and 



Fertility 79 

schools and business, as friends and citizens, and through 
eternity in the city of God. Faith touches the soil with 
the fructifying Spirit of God, and all manner of crops 
are harvested upon it. 

With our impatience for instantaneous and measurable 
returns, men often ask of what good is church-going and 
family worship and personal prayer and Bible study ? Oc- 
casionally there are immediate consequences — flashes of 
insight, kindlings of enthusiasm, awakenings of the soul; 
but these are rare. The dew which forms on the ground 
or the mist which covers a valley or the drops which seep 
into the soil from a shower seldom produce striking ef- 
fects ; but any chemist can tell us of marvelous processes 
that begin when water touches the earth, and statisticians 
with their figures of crops per acre can show an impressive 
difference to be credited to the presence of a steady stream 
like the Hudson. The many who so lightly discard the 
habit of regular attendance at church, and put aside fam- 
ily prayers as an antiquated custom, and think a Sunday 
in the country more beneficial for their children than un- 
interrupted Sunday School-going, scarcely realize that 
they are cutting themselves and their boys and girls off 
from fructifying contacts with the stream of spiritual 
influences which rolls through the ages in the Christian 
Church. The loss is not at once apparent; but there are 
many families where there are signs of pitiable spiritual 
drought. 

It is not only the meadows upon the banks of a river 
which are enriched by it. The moisture in the stream 
affects the entire valley, and fields several miles away from 
the water bear larger harvests because the stream is there. 



80 What Is Theke in Religion? 

It is not those alone who are themselves in conscious fel- 
lowship with God who are benefited by religion. Many 
persons who never open a Bible or darken a church-door 
are influenced in their thinking, their motives, their ideals, 
by the presence of a flow of Christ's Spirit in their neigh- 
borhood. Those who maintain religious institutions per- 
form a far-reaching service to the community. The num- 
ber present at worship on any Sunday is no accurate cri- 
terion of the result upon a city of holding up publicly the 
faith and purpose of Jesus. One cannot calculate the in- 
fluence of Christianity in a nation by the figures of Church 
membership. The relatively small Christian Church in 
Japan exercises an effect upon the moral standards of that 
people out of all proportion to its size. The Spirit of 
Jesus in a company of disciples in any land penetrates 
the press, education, business-life, amusements, govern- 
ment ; it is as pervasive as the atmosphere which it charges 
with moisture. To be sure a tiny brook cannot affect as 
extensive an area as the mighty volume of water in the 
Hudson River. We are vitally concerned with the num- 
ber of those who have direct dealing with the living God, 
and whose lives form the river-bed through which the 
stream of His Spirit takes its course. But it is hearten- 
ing to recall that a river's fructifying influence extends 
far beyond the fields along its banks. JSTo Sunday School 
teacher seated in the midst of a circle of children can tell 
how wide is the area of fruitfulness from the lessons im- 
parted in a morning's lesson. ISTo company of faithful 
churchmen who keep a congregation's organization alive 
and active can measure the extent of its fertilizing touch 
upon a town's or a nation's life. A prophet, addressing 



Fertility 81 

a remnant of religiously susceptible persons, spoke through 
them to an entire people when he said: "Thou shalt be 
like a watered garden." 

It is fair to remember that moisture in enriching the 
soil increases the crop of weeds as well as the harvest of 
useful vegetation. Religious movements always show 
mixed results; but that is not to be blamed upon the 
spiritual inspirations which they bring. There are vari- 
ous seeds present in every community, and the moisture 
accelerates the growth of tares along with that of wheat. 
George Eliot put this inimitably in her account of the re- 
ligious interest which the preaching of the Reverend Mr. 
Tryan brought to the village of Milby: 

"Religious ideas," she wrote, "have the fate of melo- 
dies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by 
all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, 
feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of cry- 
ing out that the melody itself is detestable. It may be 
that some of Mr. Tryan's hearers had gained a religious 
vocabulary rather than religious experience ; that here and 
there a weaver's wife, who, a few months before, had 
been simply a silly slattern, was converted into that more 
complex nuisance, a silly and sanctimonious slattern ; that 
the old Adam, with the pertinacity of middle age, contin- 
ued to tell fibs behind the counter, notwithstanding the 
new Adam's addiction to Bible-reading and family prayer ; 
that the children in the Paddiford Sunday School had 
their memories crammed with phrases about the blood of 
cleansing, imputed righteousness, and justification by 
faith alone, which an experience lying principally in 
chuck-farthing, hop-scotch, parental slappings, and long- 
ings after unattainable lollypop, served rather to darken 
than to illustrate; and that at Milby, in those distant 
days, as in all other times and places where the atmos- 



82 What Is There in Religion? 

phere is changing, and men are inhaling the stimulus of 
new ideas, folly often mistook itself for wisdom, ignor- 
ance gave itself airs of knowledge, and selfishness, turning 
its eyes upward, called itself religion. Nevertheless 
Evangelicalism had brought into palpable existence and 
operation in Milby society that idea of duty, that recog- 
nition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satis- 
faction of self, which is to the moral life what the addi- 
tion of a great central ganglion is to animal life. . . . 
Miss Rebecca Linnet, in quiet attire, with a somewhat 
excessive solemnity of countenance, teaching at the Sun- 
day School, visiting the poor, and striving after a standard 
of purity and goodness, has surely more moral loveliness 
than in those flaunting peony-days, when she had no other 
model than the costumes of the heroines in the circulating 
library. Miss Eliza Pratt, listening in rapt attention to 
Mr. Tryan's evening lecture, no doubt found evangelical 
channels for vanity and egoism; but she was clearly in 
moral advance of Miss Phipps giggling under her feathers 
at old Mr. Crewe's peculiarities of enunciation. And even 
elderly fathers and mothers, with minds, like Mrs. Lin- 
net's too tough to imbibe much doctrine, were the better 
for having their hearts inclined towards the new preacher 
as a messenger from God. They became ashamed, per- 
haps, of their trivial, futile past." 

This is admirably said, and describes not inaccurately 
what occurs in many communities among ourselves. And 
it is the strange assortment of effects, more and less de- 
sirable, which makes the fruitfulness of religion some- 
times open to question. The same stimulus which pro- 
duces genuinely saintly qualities often intensifies ugly 
traits, enthusiasm for righteousness appears commingled 
with bigoted intolerance, sympathy with the down-trod- 
den may have at its side an unfeeling disregard of the well- 



Fertility 83 

to-do, a passion to enlighten souls in the ends of the earth 
may coexist with a shocking ohtuseness to social injus- 
tices at one's own door. But the number and strength of 
the weeds are evidence of a very fructifying factor, and 
the intense results of religious awakenings are proof of 
the fertilizing touch of the Divine Spirit. We need to 
supplement our simile of a river with Jesus' metaphor of 
seed. We must take pains that the Spirit we bring is the 
authentic Spirit of Jesus: the Christlike God within us 
will produce fruits akin to those of Jesus' own character 
and work. 

In both Ezekiel's and John's descriptions of the trees 
beside the river of life the leaves are said to be for healing. 
Health is one result of religion, and a very important 
result. But no one grows fruit-trees for their leaves; 
leaves are incidental. The growth fertilized by religion 
is not primarily physical health; and the instant health 
becomes the main preoccupation of the devout, you have 
a debased fruitfulness — trees running to leaves. Examine 
the votive tablets on the walls of some church where phys- 
ical miracles are expected, as in the Basilica at Lourdes 
or in the large church at Sainte Anne-de Beaupre, and one 
is struck by the absence of expressions of gratitude for 
divine assistance to become more self-controlled, more 
considerate, more responsible, more consecrated. Go to 
the testimony meetings of cults which stress religious 
healing apart from medical and surgical means, and while 
speaker after speaker will regale the company with tales 
of floating kidneys marvelously anchored, or an appendix 
miraculously made innocuous, which some surgeon is al- 
leged to have predicted would burst fatally within twenty- 



84 What Is Theee in Religion? 

four hours (and there are unfortunately accredited physi- 
cians who tell patients luridly terrifying narratives of 
possible or probable disasters in the mysterious inner re- 
gions of their bodily organism) — while speaker after 
speaker will describe maladies cured and accidents averted 
and even financial prosperity attained from "demonstrat- 
ing" with religious formulae, there will scarcely be heard 
a syllable of advances in patience, in fidelity to duty, in 
tender sympathy with those whose hearts ache, in sense of 
social obligation — in short of advances in justice and 
mercy and faithfulness, which Jesus called the weightier 
matters. Leaves are being given the attention which 
should be devoted to fruits. 

But among ourselves we have often forgotten that our 
fruit-trees possess leaves, and that these are for healing. 
Genuine Christian faith undoubtedly affects physical 
health ; how could it be otherwise ? The trust in a fatherly 
God which supplies serenity and banishes worry, the pre- 
occupation with the interests of Christ's cause in the 
world which takes the mind off self and leaves no time 
for fancying ills, the consecration of one's body to His 
service which compels one to keep healthy that which is 
God's, and not harm it by dissipation, over-eating, bad 
hours, lack of exercise, and any neglect of the known laws 
of well-being, the dedication of means to Christ's king- 
dom forbidding us to squander them on self-indulgence 
(a productive cause of much sickness), above all the vital- 
ization of the spirit daily with supplies of God's life, the 
feeling of adequacy for one's work because His strength 
and wisdom are at one's call, the cleansing of the heart 
from the sickening presence of envy, greed, bitterness, 



Fertility 85 

revenge and covetousness, by the inflow of Christ's love, 
surely all these are most potent forces for health of body 
and of mind. The average church has paid too little at- 
tention to training its people to employ their spiritual 
resources to overcome the fears which inhibit their happi- 
ness and to sublimate the passions which misdirect their 
mental life. Happily neurologists now recognize the ally 
which they may find in religion, and the religious leader 
must avail himself of the knowledge which psychotherapy 
places at his disposal. Explicit education in the use of 
faith to assist wholesome physical living ought to be part 
of the program of every Sunday School and church. But 
we must not forget that our most successful orchards are 
conducted by men who devote their attention to making 
the trees bear fruit, and think only incidentally of their 
foliage. The healthiest Christians will concentrate on 
the work which is given them to do, and the manner of 
men they must show themselves, and let their physical con- 
dition be a subordinate, and usually unthought-of detail, 
in keeping themselves fit to be partners of their Father 
in His business. 

And what marvelous fruits are grown on soil enriched 
by religious faith! Professor Hocking has drawn atten- 
tion to the fact that the great ages of religion have pre- 
ceded the great ages of art and of science, "for they were 
attending to the fertilization of the ground/' Where a 
vital spiritual movement has swept over a people, it has 
often prepared the soil for a development in music, in 
literature, in industrial expansion, and above all in hu- 
manitarian progress. The streams set flowing by the 
preaching of the Evangelicals, Wesley and Whitefield and 



86 What Is There iist Keligiok? 

their contemporaries, a century and a half ago in Britain 
and America, had vast consequences in creating a new 
social conscience. The preachers themselves laid little 
stress on social changes: their one concern was to link 
men's souls to God in Christ. But Christ-touched men 
begin to feel, to think and to purpose more fraternally. 
A Howard takes the prisons of his own country and of 
Europe on his conscience ; a Wilberf orce is burdened with 
the miseries of the traffic in African slaves ; a Shaftesbury 
is made wretched by the plight of children in factories, of 
little boys and girls inhumanly used as chimney-sweeps, 
of lunatics handled with brutality, of operatives in mines 
and work-shops doomed to overlong hours of monotonous 
toil. Societies for the correction of abuses, for the protec- 
tion of some oppressed group, for the care of a neglected 
class in the community, for the spread of the Bible, of 
good literature, of the sway of Christ the world over, 
spring up in the wake of the evangelical preaching. It is 
frequently not the harvests directly intended which are 
the most important results of the work of those who in- 
spire men with the Spirit of God. Religion fertilizes 
the soil, and makes possible crops not foreseen even by 
those who cherished the largest expectations. These 
preachers of an intensely individualistic piety hoped to 
link men one by one with the living God ; they succeeded, 
and in addition they changed the face of human society. 
Our own age is eager to produce harvests of friendship 
in international relations, of responsible and ministering 
comradeship in our industries and commerce, of earnest- 
ness and public consecration in the pursuit of knowledge 
in our schools and colleges, of loyalty in family relations 



Fertility 87 

restoring permanency to the shockingly temporary and 
casual ties which now hold lives together in homes. We 
discover that we lack the soil upon which these may be 
grown — the soil of sensitive and inclusive consciences. 
There is a widespread recognition that only new supplies 
of the fructifying stream of the Spirit of Christ can fur- 
nish the moisture required. It will not do to talk wist- 
fully of the crops, nor to draw plans of the barns into 
which they may be garnered; our main concern must be 
with the condition of the soil. And, if history assures 
us of anything, it is that once the river of vital religion 
flows broadly through our time, not only the harvests for 
which we look, but others even more glorious, now beyond 
our power to conceive, will be gathered. 

The symbol of a tree planted by a stream, bearing 
fruit every month and full of sap and green in old age, 
is a fascinating symbol of the religious ideal for life. 
One of the early !New England divines, when dying, was 
seen to be moving his lips to frame some word, and his 
son, leaning over to catch it, heard him whisper : "Fruc- 
tuosus" It is the Christian aspiration, here and forever. 
Do you remember Victor Hugo's description of Made- 
moiselle Baptistine, the sister of Bishop Bienvenu: "Na- 
ture had made her only a lamb, and religion had made 
her an angel" ? Christian faith had taken the gentleness 
of her womanhood and infused her with the tireless energy 
of a ministering spirit. Such is the enhancement of the 
gifts and graces of a life accessible to religious inspira- 
tions. There is a f ruitfulness which surprises by its abun- 
dance and its frequency, "because the waters of the river 
issue out of the sanctuary." 



CHAPTER VI 

BUOYANCY 

UPON the waters of the Hudson tons of freight are 
carried in vessels and in long tows of canal- 
barges, and thousands of passengers are trans- 
ported up and down stream in steamers and across the 
river on ferries. The Hudson is a hearer of burdens; 
and that generations of believers discover in the living 
God. 

The men of the Bible do not employ the simile of a 
river for the discovery of the sustaining power of religion, 
for the streams of Palestine were not big enough to carry 
ships, and the Hebrews rarely became navigators on the 
sea; but they compare God to an eagle, swooping under 
her young in their first attempts at flight, and catching 
and upholding them on outstretched wings: "He spread 
abroad His wings. He took them, He bare them on His 
pinions." They represent Him as a grown-up Companion 
walking beside an unsteady little child: "When I said, 
My foot slippeth, Thy loving-kindness, O Lord, held me 
up"; or as a considerate warrior assisting a fellow-strug- 
gler on the battle-field to keep on his feet: "Thy right 
hand hath holden me up" ; or as a stalwart Comrade who 
places His arm around an over-weighted man and enables 
him to stand up under his pack: "Cast thy burden on 
the Lord, and He will sustain thee." They use an even 

more touching figure of speech and describe God as a 

88 



BlJOYAKCY 89 

father carrying His people as babes in arms : "The Lord 
thy God bare thee as a man doth bear his son/' "In His 
love and in His pity He bare them and carried them all 
the days of old," "I taught Ephraim to walk: I took 
them on My arms." A New Testament writer gives an 
added touch of tenderness to the picture by using a phrase 
employed of a widower who must try to be both father 
and mother to motherless children: "For about the time 
of forty years as a nursing-father bare He them in the 
wilderness." A prophet contrasts the heavy images of the 
Babylonian deities, carried on the straining backs of their 
devotees in a religious procession, with the living God of 
Israel, who carries His people all their days : "Their idols 
. . . the things that ye carried about are made a load, a 
burden to the weary. ... house of Jacob, and all the 
remnant of the house of Israel, that have been borne by 
Me from their birth, that have been carried from the 
womb; and even to old age I am He, and even to hoar 
hairs will I carry you." And possibly the phrase which 
has come to mean most to those who prize the support of 
religion is the line from an early poem : "Underneath are 
the everlasting arms." 

Among outsiders it is not a common idea that faith 
confers buoyancy. To a great many persons all thought 
about religion appears saddening. Tou recall what the 
tavern hostess said of Sir John Falstaff : "A' cried out, 
'God, God, God V three or four times. Now I, to comfort 
him, bid him a' should not think of God; I hoped there 
was no need to trouble himself with such thoughts yet." 
Eeligious beliefs are regarded as straining weights which 
the devout must force his intelligence to accept and carry, 



90 What Is There in Religion? 

as one straps a pack upon an unwilling donkey ; and there 
are not a few who add sarcastically that it is only donkeys 
who can be turned into such credulous beasts of burden. 
Certain types of unbelievers represent themselves as eman- 
cipated from an earlier burdening Christian creed, and 
walk about the world with an air of superior liberty. Re- 
ligious usages are considered oppressive. Stevenson be- 
gins a letter with the sentence : "I've been to church, and 
I am not depressed." Church-going interferes with week- 
end outings, and is discarded as a hampering nuisance; 
prayer is viewed as the repetition of certain phrases, often 
childish in form — the luggage accumulated in the past; 
the Bible is classed as heavy reading, and when the mind 
is already under considerable pressure, other literature is 
resorted to. Above all, religion is* thought of as afflicting 
its devotees with a troublesome conscientiousness. The 
ordinary man of the world has obligations upon him which 
he dare not disavow, but the unfortunate believer, who 
takes his Christianity seriously, must load himself with 
numberless additional responsibilities — responsibilities as 
wide as the human race — and. hold himself particularly 
sensitive to the appeals of the most backward and ne'er- 
do-well at hand and afar off. His conscience forces upon 
him an admittedly impossible standard — likeness to Jesus 
Christ; and he must task himself with every secret 
thought, every personal ambition, every acquiescence in 
social conventions, every expressed opinion, which dis- 
cords with the heart of the Master. To them that are 
without it seems preposterous that any sane man should 
assume an obligation which he knows he cannot fulfill, 
and place upon his conscience an ideal which no human 



Buoyancy 91 

being ever has attained. Their own consciences give them 
trouble enough without letting religion break their moral 
backs by piling upon them infinitely more. 

We must frankly grant that religious beliefs are often 
presented in forms which make them an intolerable load 
upon intelligence. It has been a great relief to many 
when they could set aside certain statements in the Bible 
and certain doctrines preached and taught in the churches. 
Christianity has carried along through the centuries and 
frequently published as of the essence of its message 
opinions which thinking folk find incredible, which 
tender-hearted folk find unloving, and which honorable 
folk find immoral. Their minds and hearts are eased 
when they reach the point where they fling these views 
away as outworn superstitions, even though at the same 
time they feel constrained to part with all religious 
faith whatsoever. We must also own that devout customs 
are at times made onerous. Jesus clashed with the church- 
leaders of His age oftenest over their insistence upon an 
observance of the sabbath which was to Him inhuman, 
and He was denounced as a desecrator of God's hallowed 
day. People forget that forms and habits which are up- 
lifting to them may seem to another generation weights 
instead of wings. And we must also admit that time and 
again the teaching of the Christian Church unduly loads 
the consciences of her members by placing an overem- 
phasis upon certain classes of duty. How many persons 
reared in Christian homes have gained the impression that 
the chief evidences of loyalty to Jesus are faithfulness in 
church-attendance, Bible-reading and prayers, and scrupu- 
lous abstinence from a number of harmless and possibly 



92 What Is Theee iin" Keligiok? 

very delightful amusements ! The stress on relatively sub- 
ordinate matters took attention off more momentous hu- 
man obligations ; and when the inherited convictions began 
to be questioned and thrown aside, the mass of petty scru- 
ples which went with them often lightened earnest people 
and gave them a sense of freedom. 

Men whose experiences have been in the least like those 
recorded in the Bible passages quoted a moment ago would 
protest that a burdensome religion was no true communion 
with the living God. A Christian's beliefs are not ideas 
which he compels his mind to accept: they are truths 
which grip him. They seem to approach him with hands 
and arms, to lay hold of his intelligence, and to lift him. 
They are not notions which he tries to make himself be- 
lieve: they are convictions which he finds he cannot dis- 
believe. His faith takes him off his feet, and he is con- 
scious of resting upon it, and of being borne along by it. 
Recall how religious convictions come to men. Coventry 
Patmore tells us that when he was a boy of eleven, he 
was reading a book, when "it struck me what an exceed- 
ingly fine thing it would be if there really was a God." 
He had been taught from childhood that there was; but 
that had remained a dormant assumption without interest 
for him. Dr. John Brown, the Edinburgh physician and 
man of letters, in describing the process by which his 
father became a contagious preacher, says : "The truth of 
the words of God had shone out upon him with an imme- 
diateness and infinity of meaning and power, which made 
them, though the same words he had looked upon from 
childhood, other and greater and deeper words." Princi- 
pal Shairp recounts of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen : 



Buoyancy 93 

"He spoke of the awful silence of God, how it some- 
times became oppressive, and the heart longed to hear an 
answer to its cry, some audible voice. And then he added, 
'But it has not always been silence to me. I have had one 
revelation : it is now, I am sorry to say, a matter of mem- 
ory with me. It was not a revelation of anything that 
was new to me. After it, I did not know anything which 
I did not know before. But it was a joy for which one 
might bear any sorrow. I felt the power of love — that 
God is love, that He loved me, that He had spoken to me, 
and' — then after a long pause — 'that He had broken 
silence to me.' " 

Events, books, friends, mysterious leadings, our own 
thoughts, bring home certain religious ideas — that God 
really is, that the outlook of Jesus upon life is true, that 
at the center of the universe is a Heart, that life linked 
with God in Christ goes on through death and forever; 
and these ideas, up till then mere commonplaces, perhaps 
traditional notions scoffed at as obsolete, lay hold of us, 
and we find ourselves upraised, and surveying all things 
from a higher elevation, and resting upon a new medium 
which buoys our spirits. Ezekiel was describing this ex- 
perience of being carried to a loftier outlook, when he 
said : "The Spirit lifted me up . . . and behold, I saw." 
Devout men would insist that there is something the 
matter with methods of devotion which weary those who 
employ them. Take the Sunday question, as an instance. 
Any sensible community may well enact laws, not for re- 
ligious but for humanitarian reasons, to safeguard one day 
in seven from gain-seeking labor, so far as that is pos- 
sible. The individual believer can then take the free 
day and use it for the enrichment of his life and the life 



94 What Is There in Religion? 

of the community, as he finds best for him. When one 
reads the biographies of men who have been outstanding 
forces for Christian righteousness, one is impressed with 
the number of them who felt deeply indebted to Sundays 
kept free from business and devoted primarily to the cul- 
ture of their own and other men's spiritual natures. Few 
persons in the London of a century ago were more inces- 
santly busy than William Wilberforce — member of Par- 
liament, sought-after guest at dinners, active on countless 
committees, with throngs of people on all sorts of errands 
crowding in to see him daily. In the thick of his struggle 
for the abolition of the trade in slaves, he gave up a Sun- 
day to presenting his cause in a letter to the Emperor of 
Russia, stayed home from church, and rested himself, say- 
ing : "God desires mercy rather than sacrifice." The fol- 
lowing Sunday he enters in his diary: 

"I will not quit the peculiar duties of the day for my 
Abolition labors. Though last Sunday I set about them 
with a real desire to please God, yet it did not answer; 
my mind felt a weight on it, a constraint which impeded 
the free and unfettered movements of the imagination or 
intellect ; and I am sure that this last week I might have 
saved for that work four times as much time as I assigned 
to it on Sunday. Therefore though knowing that God 
prefers mercy to sacrifice, yet let me in faith give up this 
day to religious exercises, to strengthening the impression 
of invisible and divine things, by the worship of God, 
meditation and reading." 

Here was a man to whom it seemed all-important that 
weights be removed and his spirit enfranchised, and he 
found a devoutly thoughtful Sunday setting him at lib- 
erty. 



Buoyancy 95 

Or take the Bible. Not long since, a young man of 
culture, religiously reared, but who had scarcely opened 
the covers of a Bible in years, was convalescing from an 
illness which had brought him and his little daughter very 
low, and he startled a kinswoman, who came in to inquire 
if there was anything he would care to have her read 
to him, by asking her to read him something from the 
Bible. She asked, "What?" He replied: "I remember 
some passage about armor and a shield ; I don't know just 
where it is." A concordance was consulted, the Sixth 
Chapter of Ephesians found, and after the reading, he 
remarked: "Well, there's nothing quite like the Bible, 
is there ?" 

Or take prayer. Psychologists and physicians have 
written much recently of the value of prayer as relaxing 
nervous tension, and quieting and invigorating the mind, 
as deep breath does the body. At a medical congress not 
long ago, a well-known nerve-specialist made the state- 
ment : "As an alienist, and one whose whole life has been 
concerned with the sufferings of the mind, I would state 
that of all the hygienic measures to counteract disturbed 
sleep, depression of spirits, and all the miserable sequels 
of a distressed mind, I would undoubtedly give the 
first place to the simple habit of prayer." Coleridge 
justified his custom of praying every night before going 
to sleep by giving the tested effect upon himself in the 
lines : 

A sense o'er all my soul imprest 
That I am weak, yet not unblest, 
Since in me, round me, everywhere 
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are., 



96 What Is Theee isr Religion? 

Is not that akin to the picture with which we began of a 
freighted vessel upborne by the encompassing flow of a 
river? Lowell voiced a similar sense of relaxation and 
buoyancy, when he characterized the essense of prayer as 
"that perfect disenthralment which is God." Here are 
spirits aware of the lift which is theirs through intercourse 
with the Most High. None dare prescribe methods of 
communion to another ; each must explore for himself and 
discover the mode of fellowship which upraises him; but 
the witness of all men and women of prayer is that God 
so found is an Upholder; and they bid us: "Rest in the 
Lord." 

As for the burdens which religion places on conscience 
when it touches it with the new sensitiveness and compre- 
hensiveness of Christian responsibility, we cheerfully ad- 
mit that vastly more is put upon the hearts and minds of 
followers of Jesus than on those of any other human be- 
ings; but that is by no means the whole story. A semi- 
pagan, like Goethe, made the discovery that "must is hard, 
but it is only when a man must that his real inner nature 
is revealed." Ordinary folk are aware that when they 
have to keep up under some pressure, there is that within 
which appears to upbear them. Christians explain this 
as the unlocking of spiritual resources, the releasing of 
a pent-up stream, which so soon as it is allowed to flow 
is augmented by the waters of the vasty Deep. They do 
not resent their enormously increased obligations, because 
their necessities bring with them the sustaining river. The 
more heavy the strain, the more buoyancy they seem to 
possess : 



Buoyancy 97 

Ah, the key of our life that passes all wards, opens all 

locks, 
Is not I will, but I must, I must, I must, and I do it. 



It is when a Luther reaches the point where he declares : 
"I cannot do otherwise," that he spontaneously adds : "So 
help me, God," and is most conscious of Divine support. 

In the sinking experiences of life, what does one possess 
to buoy him up ? Few are unfamiliar with the situation 
where sorrow seems about to drown the spirit. "All Thy 
waves and Thy billows are gone over me"; "I am come 
into deep waters, where the floods overflow me." One sees 
brave spirits under such circumstances keeping themselves 
afloat by various devices. None would withhold his re- 
spect from any who, without religious faith, manage to 
remain unsubmerged. But Christian faith would be false 
to its own long experience through the centuries, if it did 
not testify to the steadfast underpropping believers have 
discovered in the Father of Jesus Christ. In the cor- 
respondence of John Calvin, there is a letter to his friend, 
William Farel, in which Calvin writes of his wife's death. 
After describing an affecting scene at the bedside, he says : 
"Then I went to a secret place to pray." After a sen- 
tence or two the letter continues: "Before eight she 
breathed her last so gently that those who were with her 
could not tell whether she were dead or still alive. I at 
present control my grief so that my duties are not inter- 
fered with. May the Lord Jesus strengthen you by His 
Spirit, and may He support me also under this heavy 
affliction, which would certainly have overcome me had 



98 What Is Thebe in Religion? 

not He, who raises up the prostrate, strengthens the weak, 
and refreshes the weary, stretched forth His hand from 
heaven to me." There was something beneath him to 
lean his weight upon and be splendidly upborne. 

And there are experiences far more depressing than 
grief. Men find themselves in situations where physical 
hardships, apparently hopeless prospects, surroundings 
that appal them, combine to render their plight intolerable. 
There could be scarcely a more hideous fate than to be 
banished to the mines, as these were operated in the Roman 
Empire by condemned criminals, given a bare subsistence, 
locked in filthily unsanitary and damp pens underground 
at night, and worked for long hours by taskmasters who 
had no interest in prolonging their victims' lives; and 
one of the most thrilling documents in early Christian lit- 
erature is a letter, written by Cyprian, himself probably 
in exile, to Nemesianus and his comrades in martyrdom 
in the mines : 



"The body is not cherished in the mines with couch and 
cushions, but it is cherished with the refreshment and 
solace of Christ. The frame wearied with labors lies 
prostrate on the ground, but it is no punishment to lie 
down with Christ. There the bread is scarce ; but a man 
lives not by bread alone, but by the word of God. Shiver- 
ing, you want clothing ; but he who puts on Christ is both 
abundantly clad and adorned. The hair of your half- 
shorn head seems repulsive; but since Christ is the head 
of the man, anything whatever must needs become the 
head which is illustrious on account of Christ's name. . . • 
A manifold portion of the people, following your example, 
have confessed alike with you, and alike have^ been 
crowned. Even in boys a courage greater than their age 



Buoyancy 99 

has surpassed their years in the praise of their confession, 
so that every sex and every age should adorn the blessed 
flock of your witnessing. What must be the vigor, beloved 
brethren, of your victorious conscience, that every one of 
you walk in the mines with a body captive indeed, but with 
a heart reigning, that you know Christ is present with you, 
rejoicing in the endurance of His servants, who are as- 
cending by His footsteps and in His paths to the eternal 
kingdoms I" 

Beside this page from the Third Century, we may place 
another from the Seventeenth, on which Governor Brad- 
ford, in his History of Plymouth Plantation, describes the 
condition of the sick and imperiled band of exiles for con- 
science 5 sake, after they had landed and were in the midst 
of a ISTew England December : 

"They that know the winters of that country know them 
to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce 
storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more 
to search an unknown coast. Besides what could they see 
but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts 
and wild men? and what multitudes there might be of 
them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up 
to the top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more 
goodly country to feed their hopes ; for which way soever 
they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they 
could have little solace or content in respect of any out- 
ward objects. For summer being done, all things stand 
upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the whole 
country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild 
and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was 
the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as 
a main bar or gulf to separate them from all the civil 
parts of the world. If it be said they had a ship to suc- 
cor them, it is true; but what heard they daily from the 



100 What Is There in Keligion? 

master and company ? . . . That victuals consumed apace. 
Yea, it was muttered by some that if they got not a place 
in time, they would turn them and their goods ashore and 
leave them. Let it also be considered what weak hopes of 
supply and succor they left behind them, that might bear 
up their minds in this sad condition and trials they were 
under; and they could not but be very small. What could 
now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace?" 

The Pilgrims rested upon that, and kept up and kept on. 
It is the fashion in certain circles to jeer at religion as 
a surviving childish weakness in modern man. We begin 
life helpless and are carried in parental arms ; in maturity 
when these are no longer about us, our orphaned minds 
fancy an unseen Father still upbearing us. God is the 
projection upon the skies of an unsatisfied craving in our 
natures, and He is nothing more. It is a tempting ex- 
planation, because there come times wEen believers do not 
feel anything stable in the invisible to buoy them. Au- 
gustine confesses that at one period in his life: "Thou 
wert not any solid or substantial thing unto me, when in 
those days I thought upon Thee. If I offered to discharge 
my burden, to give it some easement, it fell as it were 
through the empty air, and came tumbling again upon 
me." And in His supreme need, Jesus Himself cried: 
"Why hast Thou forsaken Me ?" But such experiences of 
non-support are not final with believers. Augustine was 
holding on to his self-confidence and his sins, "the bag- 
gage of the world," as he calls them. When he put them 
away and committed himself utterly to the will of Christ, 
he speaks of resting in God. Through the darkness, Jesus' 
trust still prayed: "My God," and the glorious issue of 



Buoyancy 101 

His career is witness that the hands into which He com- 
mended His spirit upheld and still carry Him triumph- 
antly through the ages. There must be as complete a ven- 
ture of faith in God as that of a ship launched upon a 
stream, and with nothing "beneath it but the water, before 
buoyancy is realized. 

"Not is it true that religion with its message of relaxa- 
tion and dependence keeps men childish. Surely the men 
and women we have instanced are not puerile. The buoy- 
ancy of the river does not relieve tugs and steamers from 
the necessity of using their own power, if they would 
transport cargoes and passengers. Its upbearing renders 
possible the full output of their powers. The sense of a 
sustaining God enables a Calvin in his lonely sorrow not to 
let his work be interfered with, fortifies a mixed company 
of captive Christians to endure with contagious courage 
the exhausting and sickening toil in the mines, and puts 
heart and hope into the pilgrims in the face of overwhelm- 
ing discouragements to go forward with their enterprise. 
The world's commerce must be carried in vessels that can 
stay afloat. It is men and women buoyed up with confi7 
dence, saved from sinkings of heart and depression of 
spirits, responsive to the tiller of conscience and capable 
of employing all the energy they possess, who vigorously 
carry their own loads and the burdens of others, and 
bring both themselves and their brethren to the haven 
where they would be. 



CHAPTER VII 

SEEENITY AND ADVENTURE 

THE Hudson River is part of New York harbor, or 
perhaps we should say that New York Bay is part 
of the Hudson River, for geologists tell us that at 
one time the Atlantic Coast Plain stretched much farther 
out towards the East, and the ancient bed of the Hudson 
can still be traced beneath the floor of the ocean making 
its way to a mouth a hundred miles beyond its present 
outlet. The river front on Manhattan Island and the 
Jersey shore is to-day occupied by wharves where vessels 
dock, and it is not unusual to see a large fleet anchored 
below the Palisades in mid-stream. The river is a haven 
for ships. A New Yorker, enjoying a calm day on a 
trans- Atlantic voyage, remarks : "It's as quiet as the Hud- 
son River. " 

The steady, even flow of a river as contrasted with 
the choppy waves of the sea is used in the Bible as a sym- 
bol for the peace which comes in obedience to God : "Oh 
that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments! then 
had thy peace been as a river"; "Behold I will extend 
peace to her like a river"; "Great (that is 'abundant,' 
'flowing') peace have they that love Thy law." An early 
prophet compares the cities on the Tigris, the Euphrates 
or the Nile, where the river formed a powerful military 

protection in time of siege, with riverless Jerusalem which 

102 



Sebenity and Adventube 103 

Jehovah encompassed with His defence : "There the Lord 
will be with us in majesty, in place of broad rivers and 
streams ; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall 
gallant ship pass thereby." Christian literature is full 
of expressions of the shelter men find in God. One may 
put beside the prophecy just quoted the words of Paul: 
"The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall 
guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus." 
When men reach trust in God, they feel themselves like 
warriors safely lodged within a moated citadel, or like 
billow-tossed ships which have been faring on the high 
seas and are now in a placid stream. Listen to Dante, 
voyaging on the windy ocean of Fourteenth Century Ital- 
ian politics, singing: "In His will is our peace"; to 
Luther, with a nature that swirled in storms of intense 
feeling, writing to a brother-monk at Erfurt: "I know 
from my own experience, as well as from that of all 
troubled souls, that it is solely our own self-conceit which 
is at the root of all our disquietude," and pointing him 
for peace to "union with Christ's loving heart and divine 
will" ; and to Charles Wesley, whose lines 

While the nearer waters roll, 
While the tempest still is high, 
Hide me, O my Saviour hide, 
Till the storm of life is past, 

have so accurately voiced the longing and the answer of 
thousands of English-speaking Christians, that no hymn in 
our language is better known or more widely used. Find- 
ing through Christ a quiet anchorage as in a river while 



104 What Is There in Religion? 

life's vast ocean is storm-swept, is an experience which 
believers have known from the earliest days of our faith, 
and expressed in words placed by one evangelist on the 
lips of Jesus Himself: "These things have I spoken unto 
you that in Me ye may have peace. In the world ye have 
tribulation." "In the world" — there is the ship at sea; 
"in Me" — there is the ship in the protected stream. 

Those believers who lack serenity of spirit are failing 
to get out of their religion what is undoubtedly there. 
They have problems, public and personal, which harass 
their minds, obligations which keep them anxious lest 
they prove wanting, feelings and passions to be held in 
check and turned into an outflow of love, "fightings and 
fears, within, without" to be controlled, work to be got 
through without failing those who count on them, men, 
women and little children to be lived with, worked with, 
played with, worshiped with, harmoniously. "Thou wilt 
keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee." 
"Whose mind is stayed" — serenity is lost by letting God 
drop out of mind. When perturbed, successful believers 
have employed the grace of recollection, reminding them- 
selves that God is, and what He is. 

I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our in- 
completeness, — 
Hound our restlessness His rest. 

In a tense moment in the Reformation movement Mar- 
tin Luther received a frightened and despondent letter 
from his friend, Spalatin, to which he replied: "Great 
heavens, Spalatin, how excited you are ! If this thing be 



Serekity and Adventttke 105 

of God, it will come to pass contrary to, in spite of, over 
or under, your or my way of bringing it about." 

The Modernist, Father Tyrrell, tells a correspondent: 
"God 'takes up the islands as a very little thing, 
and measures out the ocean in the hollow of His hand/ 
and I do think we ought to try hard to look at these 
matters with His eyes — to take up the whole wriggling 
mass of squabbling humanity in our hand as a very 
little thing — a matter for quiet and not unkindly curiosity 
more than for volcanic, self-hurting, useless indignation." 
The recollection of God enables us to do our work as "toil 
unsevered from tranquillity" ; it cushions our nerves with 
bits of His own heart in our contacts with frequently 
angular and irritating fellow-humans; it restores and 
maintains poise as we try to think through bewildering 
questions; it renders the earnestness of men who must 
care as intensely as Jesus how it goes with the whole 
world and with every least mortal in it "an impassioned 
quietude." God is harbor and anchorage; and a faith 
which does not give the peace of mind of the navigator 
who has safely brought in his vessel is not the faith which 
generations of Christians have found in Christ. 

Some of the finest results of religion may seem beyond 
the reach of many believers, but peace appears to be the 
invariable effect of cordial self -commitment to God. Pro- 
fessor Robertson Smith, the eminent Semitic scholar and 
editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, once threw aside 
his usual reticence and wrote to a younger brother dying 
of tuberculosis a tender letter, in the course of which he 
said: 



106 What Is There in Religion? 

"You have had a sore share of trials, and yet perhaps 
one easier to bear than a long life of prosperity and worldly 
cares which make it very hard to keep near to God. At 
all events we know that He who orders all things wisely 
has dealt with you and with us all according to His will, 
which is the same as His purpose of love; and He will 
not forsake you, even in the valley of the shadow of death, 
if you lean on Him. Do not look inwards and vex your- 
self with self-questionings about faith and assurance and 
such like things. God gives a joyous assurance to some 
of His servants, but He gives peace to all who simply 
throw themselves on Him, humbly accepting His will, 
looking to Him as children to a father, and beseeching 
Him to be with them and carry all their burdens." 



The Britain of 1887, when that letter was penned, con- 
tained .few more acute or original minds, but in these 
simple sentences, with shadows about his loved ones and 
himself, this Christian scholar stated the religious com- 
monplace that whole-hearted trust brings quietness. 

But the Hudson River flows out into the Atlantic. 
Stand near its source on the slope of Mt. Marcy and one 
sees moisture in the moss forming a tiny trickle and be- 
ginning to feel its way down to the distant ocean : the river 
is born a venturer. Geographers call attention to the 
nearly straight course of the Hudson from Fort Edward to 
the sea, despite the fact that at some points, particularly 
in the Highlands, the river pursues a way out of harmony 
with the structure of the country through which it passes. 
It flows at a considerable angle across the Taconic folds of 
rock above the Highlands, and when it reaches these moun- 
tains it passes through a deep gorge which it has cut 
athwart the hard granites and other stone of which this 



Sebenity and Adventure 107 

section is formed. What is more enterprising than water, 
ceaselessly finding or forcing a path through soil and rock, 
around obstacles, gradually wearing a channel, until it 
reaches the sea? So rivers have always lured those who 
dwelt near them to attempt the great deep. The only 
stream in Palestine, the Jordan, empties into the Dead 
Sea, and one need not look in the Bible for metaphors 
which link a river with daring. The Hebrews, just be- 
cause no streams or arms of the sea broke their coastline, 
were never tempted out on the Mediterranean, and unlike 
Egyptians and Greeks and Phoenicians they never became 
seafarers. But their religion is represented by a long ros- 
ter of venturesome spirits — Abraham setting out from TJr 
of the Chaldees on a lonely quest for a better country; 
Moses leading an Exodus of slaves out of Egypt to found a 
holy nation; Elijah facing single-handed king and queen, 
priests and people, who worshiped inferior gods, and re- 
calling them to the just and jealous Jehovah; John the 
Baptist aflame for the kingdom of God and driving the 
people to its more exacting conscience; Jesus with no 
place to lay His head in the convictions and ideals of those 
about Him, and bidding them follow Him as the Way to 
life; Paul taking the faith of Jesus out of its confining 
limits as the religion of a handful of Jews and carrying 
it, an adapted and appealing message, throughout the 
Roman world — such are they in whose experiences flows 
the stream of the outgoing and outbearing Spirit of God. 
The very essence of their conception of Deity had in it 
this indefinite advance into an unbounded future. Our 
version makes God disclose Himself to Moses under 
the mysterious title: "I am that I am," which suggests 



108 What Is There in Keligion? 

a static Deity. But scholars seem agreed that the better 
translation of the Hebrew verbs reads them as futures: 
"I will be that I will be." Moses and his contemporaries 
are represented as led forth by One who will disclose Him- 
self to them more and more with each experience which 
they share with Him. He cannot tell them what He is; 
He can only bid them trust themselves to Him, and dis- 
cover what He will be. The language suggests a mutual 
venture upon which God and His people stake themselves, 
and in which they find out what they can mean to each 
other. 

The God of Christian faith has not often been pictured 
as a Venturer. His sufficiency in wisdom and power has 
been portrayed by a Figure in majestic repose. He 
speaks, and it is done; He thinks, and the entire course 
of events from start to finish is thought out. Theologians 
have stressed His foreknowledge. He sees the end from 
the beginning and all the intervening steps ; He prearranges 
whatsoever comes to pass; He causes all things to work 
together in unerring accord to accomplish His purpose. 

That is not the conception of the Creator of our world 
to which present scientific thinking points. He seems 
One who makes many trial-starts: He has undertaken 
numerous species of plants and creatures which have not 
survived changing conditions on the surface of the earth, 
and remain only in fossils. He seems one who equips 
organisms with elastic powers of adaptation, and lets 
them make themselves, and go on perfecting themselves : 
— a Mesozoic reptile has capacities for developing its 
scales into feathers or fur, and of becoming the progenitor 



Serenity and Adventure 109 

of birds or of beasts, or its kind disappears from among 
the living; a prehistoric man has capacities for becoming 
an artist, a scientist, a man of conscience and faith, and 
he makes use of these capacities or he remains akin to 
the brutes and is exterminated by the advancing types of 
the human race; historic man for ages and to-day has 
capacities of growing a social conscience, commensurate 
with the material forces at his command, and of develop- 
ing a finer spiritual nature by fellowship with the Invis- 
ible, or he will be wiped out by the weapons and gases 
which his own inventiveness has furnished him, and his 
spirit will be crushed out of him under the pressure of 
the things with which he surrounds and overlays it. The 
only idea of God which can be fitted into our present out- 
look upon the universe is that of One who is all the time 
risking ventures. 

That conception of Him, while it may not agree with 
some proof-texts on which theologians of the past have 
based their doctrine, is certainly more in accord with the 
general thought of God in the Bible than was theirs. 
Their conception was rather Greek than Hebrew. 
iEschylus writes: "Secure it falls, not prostrate on its 
back, whatever is decreed to fulfillment by the nod of Zeus. 
. . . God knows not toil: seated above upon His holy 
throne He worketh His will from thence by ways un- 
known." But the prophets of Israel do not hesitate to 
picture Jehovah as taken by surprise ; they hear Him say- 
ing of some iniquity of His people : "Neither came it into 
My mind." They represent Him as winning a reputation, 
getting to Himself "a name." And Jesus contended for a 



110 What Is There iit Religion? 

view of Him as a living Contemporary — a Father who 
"worketh even until now." One who was baffled and had 
to try again: "How often would I have gathered Thy 
children together, and ye would not" ; One who took risks 
and was sometimes disappointed : "He had yet One, a be- 
loved Son: He sent Him last unto them, saying: They 
will reverence My Son. But those husbandmen said, Let 
us kill Him." 

To be sure the Deity suggested by our study of the 
universe is One who cannot be permanently thwarted. 
How amazingly resourceful nature is! How promptly 
the unfit are replaced by the more fit ! How life seems to 
crowd upon the stage, eagerly awaiting a chance! What 
powers of repair nature posseses, so that one season's 
damages the next begins to make good! What an unde- 
feated impression she leaves upon us with her reserves 
constantly arriving upon the scene! When one studies 
any detail of the complex web of existence there is a fine- 
ness of adjustment which it is hard to fancy as unplanned. 
Mr. Huxley, describing ovarian evolution as seen through 
a microscope, comments: "After watching the process 
hour by hour one is almost involuntarily pursued by the 
notion that some more subtle aid to the vision than the 
microscope would show the hidden artist, with his plan 
before him, striving with skillful manipulation to perfect 
his work." Charles Darwin, towards the close of his life, 
said in a letter: "If we consider the whole universe, the 
mind refuses to look at it as the outcome of chance — 
that is, without design or purpose." And the God of 
Christian faith is both One who plans and is adequate for 
any emergency which may arise in the execution of His 



Serenity and Adventure 111 

design. He uses disasters as disciplines for triumphs; 
He discards a nation which is blind in the day of her 
visitation, and carries out His purpose through a cosmo- 
politan group of every kindred and tongue; He makes 
the cross, reared by the sins of men, the means of His 
most far-reaching victory. But the point is that He for- 
ever confronts emergencies. Walt Whitman made the 
acute observation : "It is provided in the essence of things 
that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall 
come forth something to make a greater struggle neces- 
sary. " That appears to be as true for God as for His 
children. He must continually hazard Himself in Self- 
giving love, pouring forth His fullness in life in His 
creatures, and in thought and conscience and sacrifice 
in the sons and daughters of men. 

Fellowship with such a God must be an adventure. 
The Son who fully shared His mind and heart impressed 
His first followers, and impresses every succeeding gen- 
eration of those who try to accord with His Spirit, as an 
innovator. New Testament writers speak of Him as "the 
Pioneer of life," "the Explorer of faith." Was there 
ever adventure comparable to Calvary? Jesus staked 
everything upon the hazard of His sacrificial death. He 
deliberately courted it, when He went up from Galilee to 
the capital. Throughout His career He so far outdis- 
tanced others in His trust, His hope, His love, that twenty 
centuries of religious and moral advance have not brought 
the leaders of mankind abreast of Him. One of His in- 
terpreters in the Second Century wrote: "Our limit is 
the cross of Christ," and each successive century which 
sets the spirit of that cross as its goal finds itself em- 



112 What Is These isr Keligion? 

barked on a quest which carries its pursuers out beyond 
all known boundaries. The early Hebrew designation for 
God appears to fit the Deity who speaks to us through the 
cosmic processes as we understand them and through our 
ethical ideals : "I will be that I will be." 

In its essence faith, like water, is a venturer. How 
mysterious is the outreach of a man's trust beyond the 
terra firma of things tangible and visible to rest on and 
be borne forth by the unseen God ! What an exploration 
when the mind relates the happenings of life's common 
day with the will of the Most Highest ! What a far coun- 
try the heart visits when in loving memory it follows the 
dear dead off into the presence of a most near Father, 
Lord of earth and heaven ! "It is an enterprise of noble 
daring," wrote Clement of Alexandria, "to take our way 
to God." And the modern Scandinavian thinker, Kierke- 
gaard, calls the Christian faith a desperate sortie. We 
have to fare out beyond the shore-line of common-sense, 
of the accepted maxims of prudence, of the standards 
which men of this world commend as the frontiers of 
wisdom, and cast ourselves upon One whose appeal is to 
our sense of what-ought-to-be, but never yet has been. 
"Faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of 
things not seen." It is the deep in man, a deep which 
may appear as shallow and tiny as the drop of moisture 
glistening in the moss on the mountain-side, moving to- 
wards the great deep in the universe — the heart and con- 
science of God. In faith the affections and thoughts 
gather themselves, like the trickles on the hill-slope, 
and make their venturesome start for the mighty 
ocean. 



Seeenity and Adventure 113 

Believers stress the deliverance from conventionality 
which religion confers. They feel themselves swept out 
by the current of the stream to what William Vaughan 
Moody calls "the spirit reaches of the strenuous vast," 
as the Hudson bears a ship out into the Atlantic. Men 
who come close to God know their minds unfolding for 
fresh views and their natures opening for new departures. 
It is so all down the Christian ages. The seer on Patmos 
hears Him who sitteth upon the throne declaring: "Be- 
hold, I make all things new" ; and he is ready for a very 
different city to comd down out of heaven and take the 
place of the Ephesus and the Eome with which he is all 
too familiar. Tertullian, the Carthaginian lawyer, a cen- 
tury later, writes: "Christ, our Master, calls Himself 
Truth, not Convention"; and insists in His name upon 
far finer standards of purity than the respectable of his 
day deemed necessary. John Hus pens a letter from his 
prison at Constance, in which he says : "We ought not to 
follow custom, but Christ's example and truth"; and 
he becomes the harbinger of a reformation in the life 
and thinking of Christendom. In no generation, past 
or present, will you discover men alive unto God who 
do not break with the current opinions and usages and 
move forward towards a vaster ideal. In the inscription 
upon the cenotaph, in St. Paul's Cathedral, of John How- 
ard, whose evangelical faith was his incentive and support 
in his fearless investigation of prisons and hospitals in 
Britain and on the Continent of Europe, is the sentence : 
"He followed an open but unfrequented pathway to im- 
mortality." Pasteur, whose biography reveals a religious 
devotion, when people remonstrated with him upon the 



114 What Is There ik Eeligion? 

risks of infection which he took in pursuing his researches, 
replied: "What does it matter? Life in the midst of 
dangers is the life, the real life, the life of sacrifice, of 
example, of fruitfulness." In fellowship with God men 
are borne afar from the boundaries of the usual. The seer 
on Patmos voiced the experience of many fellow-believers 
in the phrase : "I was carried away in the Spirit." 

Genuine touch with the living God always comes as 
an awakening which makes its possessors feel themselves 
loosed and launched on a larger enterprise. A minor 
singer has put this experience in autobiographic verse: 

I was quick in the flesh, was warm, and the live heart 
shook my breast ; 
In the market I bought and sold, in the temple I bowed 
my head. 
I had swathed me in shows and forms, and was honored 
above the rest, 
For the sake of the life I lived ; nor did any esteem me 
dead. 

But at last, when the hour was ripe — was it sudden-re- 
membered word? 
Was it sight of a bird that mounted, or sound of a 
strain that stole? — 
I was 'ware of a spell that snapped, of an inward strength 
that stirred, 
Of a Presence that filled that place; and it shone, and 
I knew my soul. 

And the dream I had called my life was a garment about 
my feet, 
For the web of the years was rent with the throe of a 
yearning strong, 



Seeenity and Adventube 115 

With a sweep as of winds in heaven, with a rush as of 
flames that meet, 
The Flesh and the Spirit clasped; and I cried, "Was 
I dead so long V 7 

I had glimpse of the Secret, flashed through the symbols 
obscure and mean, 
And I felt as a fire what erst I repeated with lips of 
clay; 
And I knew for the things eternal the things eye hath not 
seen; 
Yea, the heavens and the earth shall pass, but they 
never shall pass away. 

Such spirits throw off all that holds them fast, as the 
ropes which secure a ship are pulled aboard or flung to 
the wharf as she sets out on her voyage. The cords of 
the proprieties, the many-stranded ropes of custom, the 
hawsers of tradition, the wire-cables of habit, no longer 
tie up the man who has been caught by the flood of a re- 
ligious experience. William James in his study of saint- 
liness concludes: "That whole raft of cowardly obstruc- 
tions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign 
impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conven- 
tionality, our shyness, laziness and stinginess, our de- 
mands for precedent and permission, for guarantee and 
surety, our small suspicions, timidities, despairs, where 
are they now ? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles 
in the sun. The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly 
under that their very contact is unfelt." There is the 
river of faith sweeping a man out in fellowship with the 
creative God towards His own boundless life. His far- 
reaching purposes, His infinite ideals, like a vast ocean, 



116 What Is There iist Religion? 

are before us luring us away to the divine adventure. 
Necessity is said to be the mother of invention; religion 
is the mother of creation. Necessity sharpens the wits; 
religion releases heart and mind and conscience, and sends 
the whole man forth "to unpath'd waters, undream' d 
shores." 

A river flowing out into the sea — is it not a suggestive 
symbol of the life with God ? 

Take the course of man's three score years and ten, 
more or less, and blot out the Christian hope of life be- 
yond, his mortal days become a small pond, and all their 
activities trifling affairs, not the momentous business of 
a navigable stream which opens to the mighty ocean. 
How impoverished death appears when it ceases to be a 
passage through which we take our way on a thrilling 
quest, with our creative skill and impulse broad awake 
and expectant! A proposed epitaph for a Christian 
poetess closes with the lines: 

Then the sails of faith she spread, 
And faring out for regions unexplored, 
Went singing down the River of the Dead. 

A creative God, who for long seons has been evolving 
earth, again and again essaying yet better things, surely 
promises no stagnant existence to those who bear Him 
company in the fulfillment yonder of the beginnings here. 
There need be no fear of a static perfection which would 
pall upon us with its lack of incentive to enterprise. We 
dread no "torment of all-things-compassed, the plague of 
naught-to-desire." We shall still see goals shining before 
us, inviting and promising and divinely provocative. We 



Sekenity and Adventuee 117 

do not place over the entrance of heaven the inscription 
Dante saw over the portals of hell: "All hope abandon 
ye who enter here." Goethe, protesting against just such 
an inference in the popular conception of the life after 
death, said : "I could begin nothing with an eternal happi- 
ness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were 
given me to overcome." But in St. Paul's outlook hope 
abides as certainly as faith and love. Emerson put it: 
"In God, every end is converted into a new means." We 
look forward to no home without a horizon, but to ex- 
pectant companionship with One who remains there as 
here "the God of hope." 

The tides of the Atlantic send the salt water of the 
ocean many miles up the Hudson to mingle with the 
fresh stream which pours down from far inland. Men 
who live in Christian faith taste in this life the powers 
of the age to come. And many miles further up the river 
than the salt of the sea is perceptible the flow of the Hud- 
son is affected by the rise and fall of the ocean's tide. So 
believers are aware of the power of an endless life. In- 
deed there is no sharp separation between the Atlantic 
and the Hudson; and those in whom is the Spirit of 
Christ feel themselves already in possession of life eternal. 

Take the immediate prospect before our generation. 
Men and women of Christian heart, whether or not their 
heads are convinced of the feasibility of the Christian 
program, look wistfully for advances in racial comrade- 
ship, in international friendliness, and in commercial 
and industrial brotherhood. We talk glibly of democracy 
■ — of government of the people, for the people, by the 
people, extended to include every race and nation, and 



118 What Is Thebe in Religion? 

bring all into a commonwealth of friendly peoples, and 
applied to industrial organizations to embrace all who 
participate in business enterprises into a partnership of 
responsibility, labor and reward. What a huge demand 
democracy makes upon faith — faith in the capacities of 
ordinary, and sometimes much less than ordinary, men 
and women; faith in the self -evidencing power of truth 
and right to convince their reasons and command their 
consciences, even when reason and conscience are only 
rudimentary; faith in the fabric of the universe, seem- 
ingly so indifferent to man's aspirations, as responsive to 
brotherhood. There is no short-cut to success in this 
democratic experiment, any more than there seems to have 
been a short-cut to the creation of the physical and moral 
world in which you and I live. There are likely to be 
many trial-starts in the forms of fraternal political and 
business organization, as there have been many discarded, 
because improved-on, forms in the structures of plants 
and animals in the course of the long evolution of our 
planet. There are not a few among us without confidence 
in the practicability of this attempted fraternity; and 
unbelief fills them with fears and drives them to compro- 
mises and makeshifts out of line with the endeavor alto- 
gether. Faith is assurance of things hoped for, and where 
there is no wish for the advent of such a day, there is 
no likelihood of faith in its coming. Prepossession is 
always nine-tenths of belief. But where the heart hopes 
for it, what a difference when the head consents, because 
the whole man is convinced of the living God, the Father 
of Jesus Christ, who Himself is the great Venturer. He 
stakes everything upon the capacities of His children, 



Serenity and Adventure 11 & 

least, last and lowest : He offers His fullness in Christ to 
every human being. He hazards His entire enterprise 
upon the inherent might of truth and justice to win and 
hold His children's allegiance. If these fail, He has no 
other resources. His love shown to the uttermost in the 
cross is His wisdom and His power. He risks His cause 
in a world where physical conditions apparently are only 
in process as yet of attaining His mind for them, and He 
trusts that sons of His will master the groaning creation, 
and shape it with Him to be a congenial home for love. 
Whole-hearted belief in brotherhood, the assurance of the 
feasibility of this hoped-for consummation, is born in those 
who are comrades of the God and Father of Jesus Christ. 
Such believingly venturesome spirits will constantly put 
out towards it, as the Hudson moves towards the broad 
Atlantic. 

Take the subjugation of nature to human purposes — 
the conquest and utilization of matter by the Spirit of 
God in man. The Bible, from its first scene in the Gar- 
den of Eden, where man is bid subdue the earth and have 
dominion over every living thing, down to the Christ of 
the Gospels exercising a lordly command over wind and 
wave, and mastering disease and want for man's strength 
and nourishment, presents nature as a sphere to be in- 
vaded. By faith we not only "understand that the worlds 
have been framed by the word of God," but that they can 
be laid hold on by man and remade to fulfill his desires. 
This faith is the underlying assumption of our science, 
our agriculture, our engineering. One looks in a museum 
at the history of the evolution of the horse, from the small 
four-toed creature about the size of a terrier in the Eocene 



120 What Is There in Religion? 

Period to the hoofed wild horse of the Pleistocene; and 
then places beside that history of many hundred-thousand 
years the varied breeds of domestic horses, heavier and 
lighter, swifter and stronger, for all sorts of work and 
play, which man in a few thousand years has developed 
from the primitive stock. Nature is marvelously respon- 
sive to human wishes and adaptable to human needs. 
Deserts yield to irrigation and become gardens and or- 
chards; pestilential regions are turned into healthful 
dwelling-places; plants are transformed by cultivation 
and made to bear immeasurably fairer blossoms and 
richer fruit ; the forces of wind and water and steam and 
electricity, and now of radio-activity, are made to do man's 
bidding. Scientists, like Professor Soddy, tell us that 
we are in sight of a vast new realm of achievement when 
we learn to release the incalculable energy stored in the 
radio-active materials present in our earth. But they 
are frank to say that they trust that the discovery will 
not be made until man has evolved in fraternity; for a 
pound weight of such substance will not only do the work 
of 150 tons of coal, but is capable of doing the damage of 
150 tons of dynamite. It is to be hoped that no more 
truth will spring out of the earth save as additional right- 
eousness looketh down from heaven, that there will be no 
scientific advances without commensurate and even greater 
gains in character. But what a prospect of the joint part- 
nership of man and God in marching forth on a conquest 
of the physical universe and making it throughout the 
servant of love! How inspiring to view its forces, still 
so largely beyond man's control and often bringing him 
suffering and hardship and disaster, as waiting his com- 



Serenity and Adventure 121 

ing as son of God to bring in the sway of the spiritual, 
and of God Himself as waiting for us to be His comrades 
in this creative completion of earth to minister to right- 
eousness ! 

Or take the personal ideal before every individual — 
the realization of his complete self. Our world urgently 
needs bigger and better men and women, creative spirits 
in art, in music, in literature, in science, in our educa- 
tional system, our politics, our commercial undertakings, 
our church organizations. The earnest expectation of our 
age, where the whole social order groaneth together in 
pain, waiteth for the revealing of creative sons and daugh- 
ters of the creative God. The very word "God" stands 
to us for that venturesome constructive Impulse behind 
and in the universe, manifest as Life, as Thought, as 
Conscience, as Love, manifest supremely in that recreat- 
ing Person, Jesus of Nazareth, who has done more to 
alter the whole face of our world of men than any other 
single factor, and who acts recreatively every time He is 
brought in contact with an individual or with a nation. 
Religion, vital union with the God of Jesus Christ, sets 
free the creative forces within ourselves and brings to us 
added forces from His own abounding vitality. 

And in connection with self-development our picture 
of the Hudson emptying itself into the Atlantic is not 
without special appropriateness. We wish to attain com- 
plete selves; and Jesus insists that he who would save 
his life shall lose it, while he who loses his life for the 
sake of the cause finds it. God, as Jesus revealed Him, 
is always losing Himself, hazarding Himself in ventures 
of love, outpouring His thought and heart and energy 



122 What Is There in Religion? 

for the enrichment of His creatures and His children, 
and finding His life in them, as the Atlantic sends its 
tides up the Hudson twice every twenty-four hours. And 
reciprocally, faith, genuine Christian faith, opens up be- 
fore us, now and forever, an outlet for the soul into the 
unbounded purposes of our Father God, as the Hudson 
continually empties its waters into the sea. Religion's 
inspiration is always to adventure. 

Sail forth — steer for the deep waters only, 
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me ; 
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, 
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. 

O my brave soul! 

O farther, farther sail! 

O daring joy, but safe; are they not all the seas of God ? 



CHAPTEK VIII 

BEAUTY 

THE Hudson Kiver adds incalculably to the beauty 
of the whole valley through which it flows. When 
a New Yorker wishes to give a visitor to his city 
an impression of its fine situation, he takes him to the 
Eiverside Drive, where the broad band of blue water 
glints in the sunlight or provides a silver path for the 
moon; and conducts him to one of the tall buildings 
downtown from which he can have sight of the Hudson 
emptying through the bay into the distant Atlantic. The 
Palisades, and, farther up, the Highlands about West 
Point, would be robbed of more than half their charm 
were the river-bed a mere plain, instead of the stream of 
gliding water. 

The men of the Bible live in a world made beautiful 
for them, because through nature with its hills and val- 
leys and living things, and through history with its 
chequered events, they see the controlling presence of 
the wise, mighty, righteous and tender God. "The earth 
is full of the loving-kindness of the Lord." Devout pa- 
triots saw Him as "a diadem of beauty" to His people. 
Life in fellowship with Him was a lovely thing: "Let 
the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." In a sad- 
dening or terrifying experience, possibly in the face of 
death — some dark and desolate night — a psalmist de- 
clares : "I shall be satisfied when I awake with the sight 

123 



124 What Is There iisr Keligkot? 

of Thy Form." Worshipers came up to the Temple "to 
behold the beauty of the Lord." Impatient of the adorn- 
ments with which the devout of his day sought to make 
their adoration pleasing, Amos insisted that the grandest 
sight for God and men was the flow of life ordered after 
the divine will: "Let justice roll down as waters, and 
righteousness as a flooding stream." Paul looks forth on 
the course God takes through the ages in the accomplish- 
ment of His eternal purpose, and an exclamation breaks 
from his lips, as an "Oh" instinctively forms on our 
tongues when a sublime prospect suddenly opens before 
us: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and 
the knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judg- 
ments and His ways past tracing out!" And Jesus with 
a keen eye for loveliness has a scale of ascending appre- 
ciations. He prizes lilies of the field, birds of the air 
and all creatures, then mounts to human beings: "How 
much is a man of more value than a sheep" ; and finally 
climbs from man at his best in fatherly affection to the 
Most Highest: "How much more shall your heavenly 
Father!" The world for Jesus is radiant because His 
God is Lord of earth and heaven. 

There is a debate whether beauty exists in things 
themselves or only in us who perceive them. A British 
scientist, Professor Thomson of Aberdeen, has recently 
contended for the fact of beauty as part of the constitu- 
tion of nature, and says that "in the age-long struggle for 
existence the unharmonious, the 'impossible/ have been 
always weeded out before they took firm root and multi- 
plied. The monster is a contradiction in terms. Mere- 
dith put it all in a nutshell when he said 'Ugly is only 



Beauty 125 

half way to a thing.' Mature pronounces her verdict 
on ugliness by eliminating it." But capacities for seeing 
and enjoying the beautiful are required. Stevenson wrote : 
"After we have reckoned up all that we can see or hear 
or feel, there still remains to be taken into account some 
sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, 
or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the 
brain, which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as 
the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight." These 
eyes and ears of the spirit are developable organs. When 
we look forth upon the pageant of the universe the eyes 
of the heart report loveliness there, but they also see hid- 
eous blemishes, the sickening spectacle of pain, the loathe- 
some presence of mean and cruel and sordid evil. The 
outlook differs largely according to the capacity or in- 
capacity of the eyes to see the prospect centering in a 
spiritual purpose. Blot God out of the landscape, cease 
viewing the course of events as ordered by a wise and 
kindly thought, regard men as lonely orphans whose de- 
sires are unconsidered by an iron universe, give up look- 
ing at pain and death as elements in their education for 
an ampler life and evil as an intrusive alien from whose 
sway they are being redeemed, and is it not like removing 
the Hudson, and leaving in its place a swamp or an arid 
flat? 

So it has seemed to those who have felt obliged to part 
with Christian faith. The French philosopher, Jouffroy, 
has described how one December night he faced his long 
developing doubts and concluded that honesty compelled 
him to admit that he was no longer a believer: "This 
moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning 



126 What Is There in Religion? 

I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel 
an earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, 
and before me another life opened, somber and unpeopled, 
where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal 
thought which had exiled me thither, and which I was 
tempted to curse. The days which followed this discovery 
were the saddest of my life." Romanes, Darwin's bril- 
liant pupil, found the evolutionary explanation of life 
banishing God for him, and owned: "The universe has 
lost for me its soul of loveliness." Lafcadio Hearn, teach- 
ing in a Japanese University where he found his students 
without religion, says in a letter: "You can't imagine 
how many compositions I get containing such words as 
— 'Is there a God? I don't know' — which, strange as 
it may seem to you, doesn't rejoice me at all. I am ag- 
nostic, atheist, anything theologians like to call me; but 
what a loss to the young mind of eighteen or twenty years 
must be the absence of all that sense of reverence and 
tenderness which the mystery of the infinite gives. Re- 
ligion has been very much to me, and I am still pro- 
foundly religious in a vague way. It will be a very ugly 
world when the religious sense is dead in all children." 
James Thomson entitles his sincere attempt to portray 
the world as it appeared to his godless view, "The City of 
Dreadful Night" ; and thinking of an earlier fellow-poet, 
William Blake, to whom hideous and heartless London 
had accorded the same unwelcoming treatment it had 
given him, but whose London had contained a Divine 
presence, he pens lines which have a pathos when we 
recall their writer's unbelief: 



Beauty 127 

He came to the desert of London town, 

Gray miles long; 
He wandered up and lie wandered down, 

Singing a quiet song. 

He came to the desert of London town, 

Mirk miles broad; 
He wandered up and lie wandered down, 

Ever alone with God. 

Thomson's memory of his own believing days reminded 
him how to Blake's eyes the drab and dingy streets would 
wear a glory they did not now show to him. 

And believers themselves have time and again spoken 
of the beauty with which Christian faith has covered for 
them the appearance of all things. Jonathan Edwards 
(the memory of whose sensitive soul has been obliterated 
by the recollection of one or two grim details in a theol- 
ogy which he shared with most of his contemporaries) 
describes his unfolding religious life: "My sense of di- 
vine things gradually increased, and became more and 
more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The 
appearance of everything was altered ; there seemed to be, 
as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine 
glory, in almost everything. God's excellency, His wis- 
dom, His purity and love, seemed to appear in every- 
thing ; in the sun, moon and stars ; in the clouds and blue 
sky; in the grass, flowers and trees; in the water and 
all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. And 
scarce anything among all the works of nature was so 
sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing 
had been so terrible to me." Henry Ward Beecher tells 



128 What Is There in Keligion? 

how the realization of God's providence transfigured 
earth and sky for him: "In an instant there rose up in 
me such a sense of God's taking care of those who put 
their trust in Him that for an hour all the world was 
crystalline, the heavens were lucid." In the biography 
of a young professor of economics in a far-western uni- 
versity, who died a few years ago, there is a letter ad- 
dressed to him "by a well-known architect and artist in 
San Francisco, appealing to him not to impoverish his 
life by banishing the beauty of religion : "From the first," 
writes this correspondent, "the word 'God/ spoken in the 
comfortable (almost smug) atmosphere of the old Uni- 
tarian congregation, took my breath and tranced me into 
a vision of a great flood of vibrating light, and only light. 
. . . You are building yourself into a vault in which no 
flowers can bloom, because you have sealed the high win- 
dow of the imagination so that the frightening God may 
not look in upon you — this same window through which 
simple men get an illumination that saves their lives, 
and in the light of which they communicate kindly, one 
with the other, their faith and hopes. . . . You need 
beauty — you need all the escapes — all the doors wide 
open — and this seemingly impertinent letter is merely 
the appeal of one human creature to another, for the sake 
of all the human creatures whom you have it in your 
power to endow with chains or with wings." To such be- 
lievers 

Heaven above is softer blue, 
Earth around is sweeter green, 

Something lives in every hue 
Christless eyes have never seen. 



Beauty 129 

There have always been devotees of the religion of 
loveliness for whom beauty was the clearest disclosure 
of God. One thinks of the Greeks in antiquity who re- 
vered truth and goodness as divine, but who felt that these 
must be seen as lovely in order to be adored. So they 
reared temples in charming sites which were white de- 
lights of symmetrical marble, celebrated sacred festivals 
with dramas of unsurpassed moving power, and carved 
statues of gods of incomparable grace and dignity. Lu- 
cian writes of the majestically benign figure of Zeus at 
Olympia: "Those who approach the temple do not con- 
ceive that they see ivory from the Indies or gold from the 
mines of Thrace; no, but the very son of Kronos and 
Ehea, transported by Phidias to earth and set to watch 
over the lonely plain of Pisa." Dion Chrysostom says 
of this same figure: "He was the type of that unattain- 
able ideal — Hellas come to unity with herself; in expres- 
sion at once mild and awful, as befits the giver of life 
and all good gifts, the common father, savior and guard- 
ian of men ; dignified as a king, tender as a father, awful 
as giver of laws, kind as protector of suppliants and 
friends, simple and great as bestower of increase and 
wealth; revealing, in a word, in form and countenance, 
the whole array of gifts and qualities proper to his su- 
preme divinity." And there is a note of personal con- 
fession when he records the religious impression this 
statue makes: "He who is heavy-laden in soul, who has 
experienced many misfortunes and sorrows in his life, 
and from whom sweet sleep has fled, even he, I think, if 
he stood before this image, would forget all the calamities 
and troubles that befall in human life." 



130 What Is There in Religion? 

And while Greece and her worship of the Divine 
through beauty belong to the past, we still find a present- 
day analogy in many of the temples of Japan ; the Chion-in 
at Kyoto or the Daibutsu at Kamakura may easily be 
compared with the most notable shrines of Hellas. Japa- 
nese temples, set in lovely nooks, their grounds shaded 
with tall, dark, fragrant cedars (who can be unaffected 
by the cryptomerias of Nara or Nikko?), cooled with 
running brooks or lily pools, quiet save for the occasional 
booming of a deep-toned bell or the cooing of pigeons, 
with exquisite bits of lawn and patches of color in flowers 
and shrubs, and with the immobile face of a colossal 
Amida Buddha concealed among the softening shadows 
of a high-roofed shrine, appeal to the most undevout with 
a suggestive charm. 

And in nominal Christendom throughout the centuries 
there have often been believers whose religion was de- 
votion to beauty. One thinks of the period of the Ren- 
aissance in particular, and of those in our day, like Mat- 
thew Arnold and Walter Pater, who have stood for the 
Hellenic view of life. Bernard Shaw makes the indigent 
artist in The Doctor s Dilemma gasp with his dying 
breath: "I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez and 
Rembrandt ; in the might of design, the mystery of color, 
the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting, and 
the message of art that has made these hands blessed. 
Amen, Amen." It has been an insufficient faith whose 
adherents may remain selfish, aloof from the wrongs and 
pains of the mass of men, untouched by humility, un- 
moved to sympathy with any who lack taste, and some- 
times fouled by gross self-indulgences. But it has been 



Beauty 131 

a real religion with soothing, uplifting, stimulating in- 
spirations. Goethe is its most outstanding modern dev- 
otee, and his latest English biographer concludes a two- 
volume survey of his career : "So it was with him to the 
end — unceasing endeavor, ever-widening views, constant 
renewal of the springs of life." A talented young archi- 
tect who had undergone a harrowing grief recently pub- 
lished a sonnet in. The Yale Review, in which he makes 
Beauty say: 

He that keeps faith with me will surely find 

My substance in the shadows on the deep. 

My spirit in the courage that men keep 
Though all the stars burn out and Heaven goes blind 

When sorrow smites thee, look! my joy is near, 

Flashing like sunlight on a falling tear. 

Those who through sublime or pleasant sights and sounds 
and thoughts, hold communion with "that Beauty which 
penetrates and clasps and fills the world" have no con- 
temptible fellowship with the Lord of heaven and earth. 
But from the Christian standpoint it is a fractional 
religion. God is to be found not primarily in beauty, 
but in self -spending devotion. He is not loveliness; He 
is love. One of the greatest figures of the Benaissance, 
Michael Angelo, has put his confession of the inadequacy 
of the worship of beauty in a sonnet penned in old age : 

Now hath my life across a stormy sea 

Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all 

Are bidden ere the final reckoning fall 
Of good and evil for eternity. 
Now know I well how that fond phantasy, 



132 What Is There in Religion? 

Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall 

Of earthly art is vain. . . . 
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest 
My soul, that turns to His great love on high, 

Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread. 

Christians begin with the beauty of holiness, with God as 
Christlike. A religious service which satisfies the aesthetic 
nature without committing the conscience to the exacting 
demands of Jesus, without enlightening the intelligence 
with His mind and kindling the heart with His passion, 
does not supply Christian inspirations. An outlook upon 
life which sees a kindly Deity ("le bon Dieu") smiling 
upon His foolish and frivolous children, and not over- 
hard upon them when they prove fiendish to one another, 
is at a far remove from the New Testament whose God 
is a consuming fire. A righteous Father creating a new 
heaven and a new earth after His heart for His children, 
whose love costs Him untold suffering as He gives Himself 
in Jesus and in His followers to redeem a world for which 
He is responsible, and whose true sons and daughters 
share His conscientiousness and do not spare themselves 
in bringing to pass His purpose — that is the God of 
Christian conviction. 

And this conception of the Jesuslike God is far love- 
lier than any other, and suffuses with wondrous beauty 
the world in which He is seen at work, and in which men 
work with Him in His creative plan. Greek Christians 
found Jesus fairer than the most charming deities they 
had known. Clement of Alexandria speaks of Jesus as 
"our new Orpheus," and dwells on the resistless music 
of His words and life. Gregory of Neo-Csesarea says: 



Beauty 133 

"He attracts all to Himself by His unutterable beauty." 
Augustine, whose mind was steeped in Plato, fills bis 
Confessions with adjectives, for which we find difficulty 
in discovering English equivalents, to describe the at- 
traction which God seen in Christ has for him. As he 
reviews his past before he came to whole-hearted faith, 
it is its ugliness that impresses him: "Too late came I 
to love Thee, O Thou loveliness, both so ancient and so 
fresh, yea, too late came I to love Thee." And all down 
the Christian ages believers feel, and seek to make others 
feel, the beauty of life with God as Jesus embodies it. 
One finds it in Latin Christianity with its hymn to "Jesu 
dulcis memoria," and in the German address to "Schon- 
ster Herr Jesu," while an English dissenter sings : 

Fairer is he than all the fair 
That fill the heavenly train. 

The Quaker, William Penn, concludes his preface to 
George Fox's Journal with an appeal to the reader, in 
which he subscribes himself as "one ... to whom the 
way of Truth is more lovely and precious than ever, 
and who knowing the beauty and benefit of it above all 
worldly treasure, has chosen it for his chief est joy; and 
therefore recommends it to thy love and choice, because 
he is with great sincerity and affection thy soul's friend, 
William Penn." And the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, 
whose aesthetic nature we have already observed, discov- 
ers the main appeal of the Gospel to be "this sight of the 
divine beauty of Christ that bows the will and draws the 
hearts of men." 



134 What Is There iist Religion? 

Beauty is primarily to be enjoyed, but many among 
us do almost everything with their religion except enjoy 
it. Their thought of God is a spur to neglected duty. 
It is a light illumining an obligation to be shouldered. 
It is a reinforcement in a difficult and draining enter- 
prise. It is a prop to uphold a man under a crushing 
load. It is a challenge summoning forth on the high 
seas to do business in great waters. But it is rarely an 
enhancement of life, rendering lovely the outlook upon 
circumstances, the world's ongoings, upon present ex- 
periences and remotest prospects. Christians are aware 
that it does this for them, but they hesitate to indulge 
themselves in delighting in the view. They feel uncom- 
fortable when they admit to themselves the solid satis- 
faction of religion. They grant that the Westminster 
divines were not lacking in keen conscience, but they 
are chary of approving their statement that "man's chief 
end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever/ 9 They are 
haunted with the fear that it is selfish to enjoy God. And 
it would be, were their enjoyment a selfish enjoyment. 
But it is impossible to enjoy the God and Father of Jesus 
Christ selfishly. When men come close enough to Him to 
appreciate Him, to be held by Him as companions, to 
what hazardous and exacting adventures for their brethren 
He takes them. Life with Him, who declares "I will be 
that I will be" is a river carrying them out to the un- 
bounded ocean. And their usefulness as religious forces 
depends upon their pleasure in the life with God. En- 
thusiasts are the only proselytizers. Appreciation — ap- 
preciation of nature, of poetry, of music, of anything 
whatsoever — appreciation of religion is caught from and 



Beauty 135 

increased by contact with the appreciative. "Worship" 
is an Anglo-Saxon compound from "worth-ship" — "to 
give value to." Our delight in God is the measure of His 
value to us. In any situation to worship Him is both 
to use the benefit which He confers — refreshment, or 
cleansing, or power, or guidance — and to think of the 
satisfaction to be had in Him. When we drink from 
the tiny Hudson starting forth on Mt. Marcy, we not only 
find our thirst slaked with the cold water, but our souls 
feasted with the beauty of the brook. When we sail on 
the lower reaches of the river, we are not only upborne 
by the buoyancy of the stream, but we are also enriched 
with exquisite views — Palisades rising in brown cliffs 
topped with green, one of the Highlands looming in 
grandeur with the blue water winding about its base, and 
all along the sloping sides of the valley — in spring with 
blossoming orchards and dark, new-plowed fields, in mid- 
summer with a dozen shades and tints of cool green, in 
October with flaming crimsons and gold, and as we steam 
at night with towns and isolated houses agleam with 
lights. When we trust ourselves to God, we are enriched 
not only with the answer of our urgent need for upholding 
or stimulus or peace, but also with the beauty of life with 
Him, who makes all things — the opposition of the belated 
good, the indifference of the many, the devilishness of 
the few, the ghastly cross, the imprisoning grave — work 
together for good unto them that love. That is the har- 
mony and rhythm brought to life by religion. When 
we "survey" the cross, it appears "wondrous": "love so 
amazing" fascinates our whole nature — soul, life, all. 
The presentation of the Christian religion as inherently 



136 What Is There in Religion? 

beautiful, and as vastly enhancing life with its loveliness, 
deserves far more attention than it commonly receives. 
Few of the faiths which Christianity is seeking to sup- 
plant, or rather to consummate, by bringing their adher- 
ents under the sway of Jesus, have not trained their 
devotees to some extent to experience the Divine through 
Beauty. The saying is attributed to Mahomet: "If a 
man have two loaves of bread, let him exchange one for 
some flowers of the narcissus: for bread nourishes only 
the body, but to look on the narcissus feeds the soul." 
Even in the intense economic pressure of China and of 
India, their people have not lost the eye for the lovely, 
and associate it with devout aspiration. While we have 
no interest in cultivating the aesthetic taste apart from 
a sensitized conscience, we dare not overlook any capacity 
for appreciation to which Christ can be rendered appeal- 
ing. The great New Testament word "grace" never 
wholly lost its earlier aesthetic connotation. "The grace 
of God" is a phrase which presents His love as doing 
something marvelously lovely. 

On many missionary fields much remains to be done 
in enabling the Church to present the Scriptures in a 
literary form comparable in majesty and winsomeness 
to the German and English versions of the Bible ; to sup- 
ply the people with hymns as finely lyrical as their best 
non-Christian songs; to furnish her congregations with 
houses of worship which appeal to the aesthetic sensibil- 
ities of the community; and to enlarge the scope of her 
work to reach the artistically susceptible, as well as seek- 
ers after truth and men of dissatisfied conscience — in 
short, to proclaim "the grace of God." 



Beauty 137 

And within Christendom it is often possible to ap- 
proach those whose minds find intellectual difficulties in 
the Christian message with the appeal of its enhancement 
of life. George Romanes, whom we have already quoted, 
after he had passed through his eclipse of faith, in speak- 
ing of Jesus to a group of working-men, said: "What- 
ever answers different persons may give to the questions, 
'What think ye of Christ ? Whose Son is He V every one 
must agree that 'His name shall be called Wonderful.' " 
There is a haunting charm about Him which captivates 
even those whose minds find trouble in fitting Him into 
their view of the universe, or of readjusting their view 
of the universe to accord with their impressions of Him. 

And at the moment when the mood of many is the 
jaded and cynical temper of the disillusioned, there is 
special point in stressing the loveliness of the Christian 
outlook. The kingdom of heaven is opened to the child- 
like, and the awakening of the sense of beauty is a chief 
road to regaining the heart of a little child. Francis 
Thompson, in one of the most exquisitely penned essays in 
our tongue, presented the religious worth of the poetry 
of Shelley to ecclestiastics, who thought ill of this poet 
because of his break with the traditional creed and moral- 
ity, and warned them that in his eye for loveliness he 
possessed conspicuously that childlike spirit which Jesus 
so stressed: "Know you what it is to be a child? It is 
to be something very different from the man of to-day. 
... It is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to 
believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can 
reach to whisper in your ear ; it is to turn pumpkins into 
coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and 



138 What Is There in Religion? 

nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy god- 
mother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to 
count yourself the king of infinite space; it is 

To see a world in a grain of sand, 

And a heaven in a wild flower, 
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 

And eternity in an hour; 

it is to know that you are under sentence of life, nor 
petition that it be commuted into death." In the reac- 
tion which has so widely followed the idealism of the War, 
to train men's minds afresh to prize things lovely and 
to baptize their spirits into wonder is a preparation for 
a rebirth of faith. " Wondering he shall come to the 
kingdom." 

ISTor can we forget the holding power of beauty. Many 
who have lost confidence in the truth of the Bible, and 
have come to view its ideals as obsolete, continue to read 
its pages for their sheer fascination. When the Scrip- 
tures are barred from the curriculum of schools and col- 
leges because of religious prejudice, it would be a vast 
gain could they be brought back simply as great litera- 
ture — which they indisputably are. Their stately sen- 
tences and musical cadences, their apt metaphors and 
pithy sayings, their vivid characterizations of several 
hundred interesting figures, captivate the fancy. Through 
the charm of the literature men are drawn into its view 
of life suffused with the beauty of the presence of its 
God. This emphasizes the duty of the Christian Church 
to present her message and order her worship as beauti- 
fully as she can. The English historian, J. R. Green, 



Beauty 139 

when traveling on the Continent, once wrote to his fel- 
low-historian, Freeman, "I am going to High Mass to- 
morrow, inasmuch as Catholicism has an organ and Prot- 
estantism only a harmonium, and the difference of truth 
between them don't seem to me to make up for the dif- 
ference of instruments." 

Many, and probably almost all believers at times, find 
it hard to be sure of the correctness of Jesus' interpreta- 
tion of life. It is seldom easy to believe that this is a 
world under the control of a God who is love. When it 
seems too good to be true, it is well to insist that it ap- 
pears good. When heaven overhead seems vacant and 
earth about us a shambles, it is no small thing if in the 
mind there hangs the idyllic Galilean picture of a world 
in which a thoughtful Father clothes the lilies and caters 
for the sparrows and numbers the hairs of His children's 
heads. It may be labeled an illusion, but let it be con- 
fessed a beautiful illusion. It then possesses a man's vote 
to be true if it can, and prepossession is nine-tenths of 
belief. 

We began with the assertion of the scientist that beauty 
is inherent in the structure of things. That which we 
discover to be beautiful, can hardly be out of all rela- 
tion with reality. If the monstrous is in process of elim- 
ination, the beautiful is on its way to being established. 
A foremost writer on aesthetics, the Italian philosopher 
Croce, defines beauty as "successful expression." To 
Christians Jesus is the incarnation, the Self-expression, 
of God. Does not the charm of Jesus suggest "success- 
ful expression" and point to an ultimate Being at the 
heart of the universe whom He manifests ? Wordsworth 



140 What Is There iisr Keligion? 

claimed that a poet's task was "to add sunshine to day- 
light.'' Daylight is sufficient to see by, but what an ad- 
dition the sunshine makes to all we see! According to 
the Christian interpretation, God works poetically; He 
adds to useful prose the spell of musical verse. He has 
expressed Himself successfully in the Babe of Bethlehem, 
the Teacher of Galilee, the vicarious Sufferer on the 
cross, the triumphant Lord. He has made Himself known 
and felt to our satisfied delight. 

A characteristic of beauty is enduring power. Plu- 
tarch, writing several centuries after Phidias planned 
and carved, speaks of his figures and buildings as "still 
fresh and new and untouched by time, as if a spirit of 
eternal youth, a soul that was ageless, were in the work 
of the artist." Keats put the same discovery in the fa- 
miliar lines: 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever; 
Its loveliness increases; it will never 
Pass into nothingness. 

That is true these many generations after of the expres- 
sion of God in the Son of Mary. The fascination of 
Jesus abides. The satisfaction which men take in Him 
grows. Each age finds new meaning in the old titles, 
"The Desire of Nations," "The Saviour of the World," 
"Wonderful Counsellor," "Prince of Peace," "The Friend 
of Sinners," "The altogether Lovely." 

And this "successful expression" of the Divine is not 
confined to Jesus, but extends to every soul brought under 
the spell of His Spirit. Men and women through whom 
something of the heart and conscience of Christ are dis- 



Beauty 141 

closed possess an imaging loveliness. They seem not to 
belong to a passing day, much less to a past day, but to 
be harbingers of a fairer to-morrow. Sainte Beuve com- 
plains that the worldly Montaigne has "no notion of that 
inverse moral and spiritual perfection, that growing ma- 
turity of the inner being under the withering outer en- 
velope, that second birth and immortal youth, which 
makes the white-haired old man seem at times only in 
his first bloom for the eternal springtime." The lines 
with which the Elizabethan hymn-writer describes the 
heavenly city, are a true portrait of what is in the heart 
of those in whom the river of Christ's Spirit flows, and 
in social groups where that same stream finds an un- 
impeded way: 

Thy gardens and thy gallant walks 

Continually are green; 
There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers 

As nowhere else are seen; 
Quite through the streets with silver sound 

The flood of life doth flow, 
Upon whose banks on every side 

The wood of life doth grow. 

To believers Christ is the "successful expression" of 
God. Following Him they find "sunshine added to day- 
light," all things enhanced with beauty. There are ugly 
blemishes still upon the world — corporate relations and 
many men, women and little children, untouched by the 
Spirit of the Son of man. They cannot rest in an artistic 
view of existence which makes a harmonious unity by 
eliminating the inappropriate. God's Self-expression is 



142 What Is There ra Keligiobt? 

not completely successful until the charm of Jesus Christ 
is seen and felt in the life of nations and cities, and of 
all sorts and conditions of people, made immortally fair 
by the flow in them of the Eiver of God. 



CHAPTER IX 

DIVISION AND UNITY 

WE think of the Hudson Riveras a dividing bar- 
rier, cutting off Manhattan Island from the 
mainland, and separating the states of New 
York and New Jersey. Religion has always been a divi- 
sive factor, compelling believers to draw sharp lines. 
Their faith enjoins certain things and forbids others. It 
presents them with alternatives of righteousness and sin, 
and insists upon clean-cut decisions. It resolves Abram 
to emigrate from Ur of the Chaldees, Moses to choose 
"rather to suffer ill treatment with the people of God 
than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season," Ne- 
hemiah to refuse the easy ways of his official predeces- 
sors: "So did not I, because of the fear of God." It 
places an "I must" on the lips of Jesus, lays necessity on 
the conscience of St. Paul, and sets Martin Luther in 
protest against the ecclesiastical authorities with an "I 
can do no other." A river has well defined banks, and 
religion covers the moral landscape with as plain bound- 
aries. Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest takes 
an unequivocal position: 

Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest, 
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I. 

Even those whose religion is theologically vague, and who 
show scant regard for the conventional usages of worship, 

143 



144: What Is There in Religion? 

insist that God demands clean, kind, industrious living. 
George Meredith writes to his boy : "Keep pure in mind, 
unselfish in heart and diligent in study. This is the right 
way of worshiping God, and is better than hymns and 
sermons and incense. We find it doubtful whether God 
blesses the latter, but cultivate the former, and you are 
sure of Him. Heed me well, when I say this. And may 
God bless you forever, I pray it nightly." The religion 
of the Bible is uncompromising in its exaction that men 
of God distinguish plainly between His will and what- 
ever opposes or lies outside it, and that they make it their 
moral frontier: "Ye that love the Lord hate evil." 

This divisiveness hgfe often been carried to absurd ex- 
tremes. It has led believers to cultivate singularity for 
its own sake ; witness the ascetics of all the centuries, for 
whom the supreme command has been: "Come ye out 
from among them, and be ye separate." It has frequently 
fostered wretched sectarian narrowness, where the ortho- 
dox would scarcely associate with those whose beliefs 
were deemed unsound. An elderly New Yorker recalls 
how her Presbyterian parents did not like to have her 
play with the children of a Unitarian neighbor, and 
Ohio Methodists, themselves life-long Republicans, ques- 
tioned whether they might conscientiously vote for a 
fellow-Ohioan of Unitarian faith for the presidency of 
the Republic. Irenseus reports the story of the aged 
apostle John running out of a house ^tt Ephesus, when 
he heard that the heretic, Cerinthus, wks under the same 
roof. The tipsy Falstaff cries: "If I be drunk, I'll be 
drunk with those that have the fear of God." It has 
sundered Christians in hostile ecclesiastical camps^ while 



Division and Unity 145 

all professed supreme allegiance to the unifying Spirit 
of love. Bernard Shaw says of his native Ireland: "If 
religion is that which binds men to one another, and 
irreligion that which sunders, then must I testify that I 
found the religion of my country in its musical genius, 
and its irreligion in its churches and drawing-rooms." 
Shaw is right in Christian eyes when he declares that 
religion is that which binds men to one another: ours is 
the worship of Christlike love in heaven and earth; but 
it is none the less a separating stream. It does not divide 
men as correct and mistaken thinkers, or as strict and 
lax worshipers, or even as believers and infidels, but it 
classes them as loving and selfish. Inasmuch as ye did 
it, or did it not, unto one of the least of these My 
brethren, ye did it, or did it not, unto Me — so runs a 
sentence of judgment which erects an eternal partition. 
"Every one that loveth is begotten of God and knoweth 
God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is 
love." 

Yes, this river of God divides. Eeligious conviction 
sharpens the conscience to "distinguish things that dif- 
fer." We are obliged to adopt the godlike course as the 
way of life, and to shun all others as leading to death. 

But the Hudson River is ^ unifier. Across its waters 
hundreds of ferries ply, and up and down stream steam- 
ers and barges convey passengers and freight. Navigable 
rivers are connecting arteries establishing easy inter- 
course between towns miles apart. Religion unifies; 
indeed religion furnishes the only ultimate basis of unity. 

Look at the differences that divide. To begin with, 
take the difference between ourselves and the physical 



146 What Is There in Religion? 

universe. Mrs. Browning is evidently uttering a bit of 
autobiography in tbe lines: 

You who keep account 
Of crisis and transition in this life, 
Set down the first time Nature says plain "no" 
To some "yes" in you, and walks over you 
In gorgeous sweeps of scorn. We all begin 
By singing with the birds, and running fast 
With June days, hand in hand; but, once for all, 
The birds must sing against us, and the sun 
Strike down upon us like a friend's sword caught 
By an enemy to slay us, while we read 
The dear name on the blade which bites at us ! — 
That's bitter and convincing; after that 
We seldom doubt that something in the large 
Smooth order of creation . . . has gone wrong. 

We are at one with the physical world, bone of its bone, 
flesh of its flesh, life of its life, dust of its dust; but it 
is not at one with us. There is nothing in it akin to 
our mind and heart. If both it and we had one Maker, 
we are tempted to fancy that He made man with His 
right hand and all things else with His left, and did not 
let His right hand know what His left was doing. Car- 
lyle in old age, walking with a friend beside the Thames, 
exclaimed: "There is healing in the air and sunshine; 
but the sun and air and water care nothing for man's 
dreams or desires; they have no part nor lot wi' us." 
Whittier voices the impression of the impersonality of 
natural forces in the lines in Snoiv-Bound: 

The shrieking of the mindless wind, 
The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind, 



Division and Unity 147 

And on the glass the unmeaning "beat 
Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet. 



We, with our affections and ideals of duty, are constantly 
at odds with a scheme of things in which there is suffer- 
ing, decay and death. Earth sometimes in its beauty 
seems a playroom, and sometimes in its law-abidingness a 
school-room, and sometimes in its painfulness a torture- 
chamber. What can reconcile us with the physical uni- 
verse ? 

Science proposes to investigate everything, and gain- 
ing control over all forces to harness them to man's will 
— a unity of complete knowledge and mastery. Art at- 
tempts to select and combine the delightful and har- 
monious elements in sound or color, and even to present 
the disagreeable and jarring elements beautifully, as 
Shakespeare portrays the tragedy of a Hamlet or a Lear 
— a unity of pleased feeling. Biblical religion goes 
deeper and asserts that there is genuine unity — "one God 
and Father of all, who is over all and through #11 and 
in all." Our metaphor of the river fits that saying of 
St. Paul's : the Divine Spirit flows from above through 
and in everything, linking all in a oneness of life. To 
be sure there is by no means as much of the Hudson in 
the noisy brook which runs down the slope of Mt. Marcy 
as in the stately stream which sweeps past Tarrytown 
and Nyack. In impersonal existences — sun and air and 
water — there is as much of the Spirit of God as they can 
contain — God as energy, law, adaptability to human 
service. In living creatures there is more — God as in- 
stinct, feeling, rudimentary conscience, capacity for 



148 What Is There iist Religion? 

higher development. In mankind there is more still — 
God as reason, conscience, affection. Religion agrees 
with science that man is to study and master forces; and 
it pictures these forces as awaiting his mastery: "The 
earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the re- 
vealing of the sons of God." But it goes farther, and 
declares that where we cannot understand, much less 
control, the forces pitted against us — inevitable death for 
example — we can still view them fearlessly, as known 
and ruled by our wise and kind Father, and go down 
before them triumphantly, as Jesus on the cross. Re- 
ligion agrees with art that there is a way of viewing 
existence which renders it delightful; but this is not by 
merely selecting some elements in life, while closing our 
eyes to others. All, harmonious and incongruous, pleas- 
ant and heart-breaking, fair and ugly, are to be cordially 
accepted, moulded if possible to the soul's desire, and 
where they prove intractable, still accepted confidently 
as being moulded for us by the Hand of God. "To them 
that love God all things work together for good." 

Let us take some instances of the Christian's recon- 
ciliation with unwelcome things. Milton's sonnet On 
His Blindness is familiar; fewer know the letter which 
he wrote to Leonard Philaras, which concludes: 

"And so whatever ray of hope there may be for me 
from your famous physician, all the same, as in a case 
quite incurable, I prepare and compose myself accord- 
ingly. . . . My darkness hitherto, by the singular kind- 
ness of God, amid rest and studies, and the voices and 
greetings of friends, has been much easier to bear. . . . 
If, as is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone/ what 



Division and Unity 149 

should prevent one from resting likewise in the belief 
that his eyesight lies not in his eyes alone, but enough 
for all purposes in God's leading and providence ? Verily, 
while only He looks out for me . . . leading me forth 
with His hand through my whole life, I shall willingly, 
since it has seemed good to Him, have given my eyes their 
long holiday. And to you, dear Philaras, whatever may 
befall, I now bid farewell, with a mind not less brave 
and steadfast than if I were Lynceus himself for keen- 
ness of sight." 



Milton is willing to profit by the skill of any physician, 
but facing what seems incurable blindness, his faith 
unites him with it courageously. Religion is a river con- 
necting in friendship an eager spirit and a grim physical 
limitation. 

When General William Booth was a very old man, 
his eyesight failed him, and the treatment given him 
proved ineffective. It fell to his son, Bramwell, to break 
the news to the veteran leader that he must abandon hope 
•of seeing again. He received the statement calmly, and 
after a little silence said: "Bramwell, I have done what 
I could for God and for the people with my eyes. Now 
I shall do what I can for God and for the people without 
my eyes." This is the same faith which led Paul to 
acquiesce in his "stake in the flesh." He prayed earnestly 
to be freed from that impediment to service; but when 
this was denied, he not only still persevered, but per- 
severed with good grace: "Most gladly therefore will I 
rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ 
may rest upon me." 

Or take the difference between a man and his fellow- 



150 What Is There in Religion? 

mortals. All our dealings with other people stand on the 
assumption that there is a spiritual kinship between us 
and them. We take for granted that what is truth for 
us, is truth for Esquimaux and Chinese and Patagonians ; 
so we work for the spread of education all over the world. 
We assume that what is beautiful to us is also beautiful 
to all races, red and yellow and black. There may be 
differences of taste in many matters, but an #utumn sun- 
set, or the sound of rippling water, or a lark's song, is 
lovely to all. What is best in the literature or in the art 
of any people, even a primitive people, has an appeal 
for all mankind. We assume that ideals of justice, of 
goodwill, of brotherhood, command the assent of savage, 
barbarian and civilized men. Conscience may need 
awakening, but there is a dormant responsiveness to right 
in every one; and there is no "East of Suez, where the 
best is like the worst" on the map of our world. So we 
plan international agreements and talk of international 
law. The universal appeal of truth, of beauty, of right, 
is taken for granted by religious and irreligious, and 
this river of spiritual kinship makes possible intercourse 
between all groups of human beings. 

But it is one thing to know that a river which flows 
by your town also flows by others many miles distant, 
and quite another thing to be drawn to embark on its 
waters and travel to them. To Christians, Truth, Beauty, 
Eight, are names for the one living God. We view our 
Father encompassing every life with His love, and call- 
ing us out towards them in sympathy and service. When 
men interpret the river of their spiritual kinship as 



Division and Unity 151 

Jesus interpreted it, then it becomes a matter of obliga- 
tion to revere, trust and serve them as Christ has 
served us. 

Look at the distances which separate groups of men 
in races, in nations, in economic classes, to-dty; and 
what can unite them? Some are convinced that they 
never will be linked in friendship. They admit that a 
spiritual likeness connects them, but they regard this as 
affording the chance for hostile contacts, as a river pro- 
vides the meeting-place for battling war-canoes from en- 
campments of savages who dwell on its shores. What 
quantities of books our presses have turned out upon 
racial conflicts, and rival nationalistic interests, and the 
strife of classes! But those for whom the connecting 
river is the Spirit of the God and Father of Jesus Christ 
are assured that this stream carries us to friendship. We 
do not think that the towns along the river must lose their 
separate identity, and form one unbroken chain of 
monotonous city water-front the whole length of the 
stream. We do not believe that religion demands the 
obliteration of racial divisions, or the fusing of nations, 
or even economic equality. The landscape formed by a 
river lined by a continuous series of city streets on a flat 
level would have little charm. It is the towns, smaller 
and larger, with their distinctive characteristics and 
marked differences, on higher and lower land, all joined 
by the one band of blue water, on which boats come and 
go in happy and helpful commerce, which gives the pic- 
ture its attraction. Let Christlike convictions concerning 
God and man, and the consequent Christlike conscien- 



152 What Is There in Religion? 

tiousness, govern the contacts of races and nations, and 
of the various groups in industry and commerce, and 
the unity required is achieved. 

This is not mere theory; it is confirmed by abundant 
experience where such Christian intercourse has been 
tried. Witness the record of William Penn's relations 
with the Indians, of the dealings of sincere missionaries 
with peoples of many lands, of our own country's hand- 
ling of the Boxer indemnity with China and our treat- 
ment of Cuba after the Spanish War, of Britain's atti- 
tude to South Africa under the ministry of Sir Henry 
Campbell-Bannerman at the close of the contest with the 
Boer Republics, of the relations between employers and 
operatives in factories where cooperative efforts have been 
undertaken and carried on with genuine mutual confi- 
dence. 

At a Post-Communion Service at Bandawe in Central 
Africa an elder told how he had been a slave and had 
been sold and re-sold some half-dozen times. Then hear- 
ing of the settlement of the Livingstonia Mission, he fled 
from his owner and reached the Station, where he heard 
that great pioneer, Dr. Robert Laws, preaching on 
Isaiah lxv:25, and urging the people to open their 
hearts to the love of God, which would put an end to 
war among the tribes. 



" Tut your faith in God/ " the Sing'anga said, " 'obey 
His word, and the leopard shall yet lie down with the 
lamb and the kid in the same kraal in peace/ In my 
heart I said, 'White man, you lie!' And yet, what do I 
see now? The leopard and the lamb together at peace, 



Division and Unity 153 

indeed. Ngoni and Tonga here at the same Communion 
Table!" 



The satisfactory contacts between races and nations and 
industrial groups, where the Spirit of Jesus has been 
seriously followed/ are beyond dispute. It demanded 
courageous faith in primitive man to venture himself in 
his crude dug-out on the surface of a stream and risk 
intercourse with strangers; but that faith was the begin- 
ning of a new era of social progress. It demands cou- 
rageous faith still in racial leaders and statesmen, in 
employers and employees, to trust themselves in experi- 
mental plans of comradeship to the river of the Spirit of 
Christ and to move out towards those whose differences 
from themselves are patent, but that faith will mark a 
new epoch in the history of mankind. 

And inside the groups of human beings religion is the 
ultimate unifier. The first of such groups is the family. 
It is bound together by physical and economic and senti- 
mental attachments; but we see these ties snapping, and 
husbands and wives, parents and children, parting, and 
parting with appalling frequency in our American life. 
The conventional reasons, which in the past have kept 
them from separating, have grown weaker so swiftly in 
recent years, that the statistics of broken homes in the 
United States become more and more terrifying to all 
who regard permanent family-life as the basis of a 
healthy commonwealth. Divorces in our country have 
more than doubled in twenty years — from 61,000 in 
1901 to 132,000 in 1920, and in several states there is 
one divorce recorded for every four or five marriages. 



154 What Is There iit Religion? 

Physicians, lawyers, ministers, friends, who are called on 
to try to hold together lives pulling apart, know how 
fragile the marriage-tie is to-day. The New Testament 
speaks of marrying "in the Lord" — that is, under Christ's 
control. In the wedding service the solemn phrase is 
used: "Those whom God hath joined together," which 
surely does not mean merely that this couple have taken 
pledges to each other in a religious ceremony. God can- 
not join lives, save as both allow Him to form their con- 
sciences, rule their instincts, and inspire their purposes. 
It is romantic love hallowed with religious conscience, 
of which Mr. Lowell writes in lines concerning his wife, 
where he uses the metaphor of our parable: 

I love her with a love as still 

As a broad river's peaceful might, 
Which by high tower and lowly mill, 
Goes wandering at its own sweet will, 
And yet doth ever flow aright. 

And, on its full, deep breast serene, 

Like quiet isles my duties lie; 
It flows around them and between, 
And makes them fresh, and fair, and green, 

Sweet homes wherein to live and die. 

Or take the religious group — the Christian Church — 
for whose unification we so often pray and arrange con- 
ferences. It may seem a truism to say that we shall get 
no further towards Church unity until there is more of 
the Christian religion in the churches. But that is the 
plain fact. Some of our divisions rest upon interpreta- 
tions of history, and we need more faith in the God of 



Division and Unity 155 

truth to bring an honest facing of history. In 1864 
Newman wrote to Father Coleridge: 

"Nothing would be better than an Historical Review 
for Roman Catholics — but who would bear it? Unless 
one doctored all one's facts, one would be thought a bad 
Catholic." 

And the same can be said of many Protestants in their 
attitude towards historical investigations of the Bible. 
Woe to the scholar who frankly reports what he finds! 
He will fare hardly in the educational institutions of 
many of our communions. More of our divisions rest 
at present upon differences of taste, of temperament, of 
social status. We need a more moving apprehension of 
God as love to carry us out in an inclusive fellowship, 
which shall allow within its communion fullest freedom 
for all these inevitable differences. Henry Ward Beecher 
recounts an experience which emancipfrted his spirit from 
denominationalism : 

"I remember riding through the woods for long, dreary 
days, and I recollect at one time coming out into an open 
place where the sun shone down through the bank of the 
river, and where I had such a sense of the love of Christ, 
of the nature of His work on earth, of its beauty and 
grandeur, and such a sense of the miserableness of Chris- 
tian men quarreling and seeking to build up antagonistic 
churches — in other words the Kingdom of Christ rose up 
before my mind with such supreme loveliness and maj- 
esty — that I sat in my saddle I do not know how long 
(many, many minutes, perhaps half an hour), and there 
all alone, in a great forest of Indians, probably twenty 
miles from any house, I prayed for that Kingdom, saying 
audibly : 'I will never be a sectary/ " 






156 What Is There in Religion? 

It is such a full stream of appreciation of Christ and of 
the urgency of His cause on which fellow-Christians of 
widest differences of opinion and tradition and tempera- 
ment can be borne into closest comradeship with one 
another. 

Groups — families, churches, communities, nations — 
are fused by a common passion and kept together by a 
common obligation. The Christian faith furnishes the 
most kindling enthusiasm and the most sensitive con- 
scientiousness. "The love of God is shed abroad/' wrote 
Paul, using our metaphor, "The love of God is pouring 
as a stream to flow in our hearts." 

And the most serious disunity exists within a man's 
self. There is the glaring contradiction between what 
he should have been and what he is. Phaedra, who has 
calumniated Hippolytus and brought on his death, cries, 
in Euripides' drama: 

Oh, I am sick with shame! 

Aye, but it hath a sting! . . . 
Could I but die in one swift flame 

Unthinking, unknowing. 

Augustine, commenting on the Thirty-third Psalm, in- 
terjects a personal experience : "Whither fly I ? Whither- 
soever I go my self followeth me." Religion brings its 
message of forgiveness to whoever repents, turning reso- 
lutely from his past, however awful. Forgiveness does 
not wipe out that past. It remains part of ourselves, and 
just because it remains, we can remold it. The flaws of 
our past are the river-bed down which the stream of the 
divine mercy is poured. We are reconnected with our 



Division and Unity 157 

former self, only connected by the stream of God's life, 
which supplies us with power to repair whatever is 
reparable, and which transforms the ugly landscape by 
His presence, enabling us to live with our else loathed 
self, as a river, flooding an arid and cracked bottom, 
suffuses it with beauty. 

There is the divergence between a man's aspirations 
and his inclinations. Every one knows himself a bundle 
of contradictions. Sir James Stephen has sketched the 
character of Henry Martyn, the future missionary, in his 
student days: 

"A man born to love with ardor and to hate with 
vehemence ; amorous, irascible, ambitious, and vain ; 
without one torpid nerve about him; aiming at universal 
excellence in science, in literature, in conversation, in 
horsemanship, and even in dress; not without some gay 
fancies, but more prone to austere and melancholy 
thoughts; patient of the most toilsome inquiries, though 
not wooing philosophy for her own sake ; animated by the 
poetical temperament, though unvisited by any poetical 
inspiration ; eager for enterprise, though thinking meanly 
of the rewards to which the adventurous aspire; uniting 
in himself, though as yet unable to concentrate or to har- 
monize them, many keen desires, many high powers, and 
much constitutional dejection — the chaotic materials of a 
great character." 

And he describes how, under the preaching of Charles 
Simeon at Cambridge, Henry Martyn came to "an un- 
limited affiance in the holiness and wisdom of Him, in 
whose person the divine nature had been allied to the 
human, that so, in the persons of His followers, the human 
might be allied to the divine." And in picturing to what 



158 What Is There in Religion? 

this pioneer of the Kingdom in India attained, lie falls 
into the simile of our parable: 

"He rose to the sublime in character ... by the 
copiousness and the force of the living fountains by 
which his spiritual life was nourished. . . . The ill- 
disciplined desires of youth, now confined within one 
deep channel, flowed quickly onward towards one great 
consummation ; nor was there any faculty of his soul, or 
any treasure of his accumulated knowledge, for which 
appropriate exercise was not found in the high enterprise 
to which he was devoted. " 

The man was united within himself by the inflowing river 
of God, and all the dissevered miscellaneous elements of 
his nature bound in one divine purpose, as the towns and 
villages along a navigable stream form a single business 
community. 



CHAPTER X 



CHANGE AND PEKMANENCE 



THE form which the Hudson River assumes is de- 
termined by the contour of the country through 
which it flows. The stream is now broader, now 
narrower; now it holds a straight course as from Fort 
Edward to Newburgh, and again from Stony Point to 
'New York Bay, now it winds about as from the Adiron- 
dack^ to Glens Falls and through the Highlands ; now its 
channel is deeper, now more shallow; now its banks rise 
precipitously as in the Palisades, or on Breakneck and 
Storm King mountains, or in the Stony Creek gorge, now 
there is a gradual slope up the sides of the valley. Photo- 
graph it at a number of points, and when the photographs 
are ranged side by side a stranger might not recognize 
them as pictures of the same river. 

Geologists reconstruct for us the Hudson as it appeared 
in bygone ages. The depth of the rock channel in the 
Tertiary Period can still be measured in the Highlands 
some two thousand feet below the present bottom. In the 
pre-glacial age instead of flowing south through the Stony 
Creek gorge to Corinth, the river ran southeast from 
Warrensburg to Glens Falls. There have been periods 
when the ocean came up to the Adirondacks, and periods 
when the land stretched several hundred miles further out 

to sea than at present. When one traces the course of 

159 



160 What Is There in Keligion? 

the Hudson on these various maps, it is a very different 
stream from the familiar river of to-day. 

The Christian religion has flowed in the river-bed 
available for it in each generation. ITow the faith has 
been embodied in small groups of humble folk awaiting 
a speedy return of the Lord to set up His kingdom ; now 
in a much larger community, conscious of a spiritually 
present Christ and interpreting its earlier gospels to 
make Him intelligible to the people of the Mediterranean 
world; now in a persecuted Church, living a hunted life 
in catacombs and obscure meeting-places; now in a tri- 
umphant Church, well-organized, wealthy, in alliance 
with government, and attempting to embody its princi- 
ples in the law of the Empire; now in companies of 
earnest men and women, fleeing from a worldly Church 
to live alone in the deserts in austere communion with 
the Invisible; now in an imperial Church, authorita- 
tively declaring the will of God to kings and peoples, 
controlling education, art, charity and regulating public 
and private morals; now in various bodies of proscribed 
Protestants, seeking to recover the primitive religious 
experiences of the New Testament; now in nations war- 
ring on behalf of freedom ; now in nations attempting to 
outlaw war altogether and to substitute the reign of 
reason and of Christian conscience for that of brute 
force ; now in a Church devoting itself to save individuals 
out of an evil world, and now in a Church striving to 
let the Spirit of Christ rule the world's entire life. Pic- 
tures of the stream of Christianity at various epochs in 
history or in its various forms to-day seem not to be rep- 
resentations of the same river. 



Change and Permanence 161 

There is a similarly changing appearance when one 
takes the course of the river of the Spirit in the life of 
any individual. Think of the God of our own childhood, 
and of the feelings with which we regarded Him; then 
of the God of our developing youth, if a God remained 
distinctly in our minds during those years when our out- 
look on life was changing with kaleidoscopic rapidity; 
then of the God of our young manhood, before whose 
presence momentous decisions were reached, and of the 
personal relationship with Him into which we entered; 
then of the God of our maturer years, sometimes lost 
when youth's idealism vanished, sometimes regained with 
firmer assurance as observation and experience convinced 
us of His necessity and He seemed the reasonable and 
indispensable interpretation of an otherwise irrational 
world. Think of the varying aspects of God and our 
own altering attitudes toward Him which the circum- 
stances of life have brought : — the God of shame, the God 
of comfort, the God of personal intimacy, the God of 
social obligation, the God of judgment revealed in a 
world-catastrophe, the God of hope who alone offered the 
power of repair and the assurance of stability, the God 
who hideth Himself, the God whose hidings prove His 
ways of Self-disclosure. John Fiske gave us a graphic 
description of "a tall slender man, of aquiline features, 
wearing spectacles, with a pen in his hand, and another 
behind his ear," who stood at a desk overlooking the 
world, and, assisted by a recording angel, entered the 
deeds of every mortal in a ledger. That was his child- 
hood view of Deity. Frederick William Faber addressed 
the God of his first recollections in the lines : 



162 What Is There in Religion? 

I could not sleep unless Thy Hand 

Were underneath my head, 
That I might kiss it, if I lay 

Wakeful upon my bed. 

And quite alone I never felt, — 
I knew that Thou wert near, 

A silence tingling in the room, 
A strangely pleasant fear. 

But while notions of God may be recalled, it is impos- 
sible to summon back childhood's religion. That in its 
simplicity and imaginativeness and physical realism is 
gone as irrevocably as the water that was in the Hudson 
when you and I were under ten. The maps which geo- 
logical historians make of the Hudson Valley in the 
divers epochs of the past are not more varied than the 
spiritual charts we should be obliged to construct, were we 
to undertake to show the flow of religion in our souls at 
different stages in our development. 

From of old a river has been the metaphor of fleeting 
change. The stream is never the same for two consecu- 
tive minutes. The water is constantly moving. Attempt 
to stop the current in order to examine it, and the river 
itself is completely altered. You have a reservoir or a 
lake, not a flowing stream. This makes a river so apt a 
simile of religious experience. For what is our sense of 
God but a series of flitting impressions, of emotions that 
rise and subside in waves, of moments of confidence alter- 
nating with moments of scepticism, of intense enthu- 
siasms changing to placid indifference, of broad expanses 
of heart which reflect the sunny skies and narrow, pent- 
in currents that take their dark course with power ? 



Change and Permanence 163 

This is true of the experience of the race as we trace 
the line of the river of religion through the centuries. 
Browning's Bishop soliloquizes: 

Had I been born three hundred years ago, 
They'd say, "What's strange? Blougram of course be- 
lieves" ; 
And, seventy years since, "Disbelieves of course." 
But now, "He may believe: and yet — and yet — 
How can he ?" 

In one of Shirley's plays, written in the time of Charles 
the First, a character says: "Praying's forgot"; to which 
a companion remarks : " 'Tis out of fashion." We can 
never expect the identical theology or religious habits or 
modes of devout expression in successive generations. 
Dr. Lyman Beecher's godly life reappeared in his distin- 
guished children, but not his religious opinions and 
methods. 

There is the same continual flux in the personal re- 
ligious experience. Jeremiah asks: "O Thou Hope of 
Israel, the Saviour thereof in the time of trouble, why 
shouldest Thou be as a sojourner in the land, and as a 
wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night ?" 
There is your stream always passing. In the old story 
of Jacob at the Jabbok, the patriarch is represented as 
trying to hold the mysterious Visitant, who wrestles with 
him in the darkness, and as asking His name, but the 
Divine never abides man's questions, as a river never 
stops to let itself be examined. In her account of 
Savonarola, George Eliot observes that a man "must often 
speak in virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping it will come 



164 What Is There in Religion? 

back to-morrow." Luther confessed that at times he be- 
lieved and at times he doubted. There is an interesting 
letter of the sturdy Protestant champion, Hugh Latimer, 
to his fellow-martyr, Nicholas Ridley, in which he writes : 
"Pray for me, I say. For I am sometimes so fearful, 
that I would creep into a mouse-hole; sometimes God 
doth visit me again with His comfort. So He cometh 
and goeth." Thomas Arnold, a vigorous believer, de- 
clares: "There are whole days in which all the feelings 
or principles of belief or of religion altogether are in 
utter abeyance; when one goes on very comfortably, 
pleased with external and worldly comforts, and yet 
would find it difficult, if told to inquire, to find a particle 
of Christian principle in one's whole mind." In Victor 
Hugo's Quatre-Vingt-Treize Boisberthelot asks La Vieu- 
ville: "Do you believe in God, chevalier?" and the reply 
comes : "Yes. "No. Sometimes." And this flux of faith, 
which is discovered when men look in and search for God 
within their souls, is found also by those who scan the 
outer world for tokens of His presence. The Duke of 
Argyll reports a conversation with Charles Darwin dur- 
ing the last year of that scientist's life: "I said to Mr. 
Darwin with reference to some of his own remarkable 
works on 'Fertilization of Orchids' and on 'The Earth- 
worms,' 'It was impossible to look at these without seeing 
that they were the effect and expression of mind.' I shall 
never forget Mr. Darwin's answer. He looked at me hard 
and said: 'Well, that often comes over me with over- 
whelming force; but at other times,' and he shook his 
head vaguely, adding, 'it seems to go away.' " 

The Spirit of God in us, like the Hudson in the coun- 



Change and Permanence 165 

try through which it flows, is given His channel by our 
physical conditions, our temperaments, our mental train- 
ing. The river of the water of life has to take its way 
through the available watershed. And a stream is in its 
very nature ceaselessly changing. This is often a sore 
distress to devout souls. John Wesley, thinking both of 
himself and his adherents, enters in his Diary the ques- 
tion: "Oh, why should we not be always what we were 
once?" But the very attempt to examine ourselves and 
test the flow of the Spirit within is like the effort to stop 
a river in order to investigate it. A river is not a river 
except as it moves. Obstruct it with a dam, and the 
stream below runs away, while the waters above pile up 
in a pool. The act of self-examination for the moment 
destroys the river of the water of life. "William Cowper, 
the hymn-writer, when dying was asked by the physician 
how he felt, and replied: "I feel unutterable despair." 
We explain his feelings by his mental and physical con- 
dition, and we see the abundant stream of the Spirit in 
his life, which still flows on through the heritage of his 
poetry. We hear Jesus on the cross crying: "Forsaken!" 
and in the same breath clinging in faith: "My God." 
There are the changing emotions and the abiding rela- 
tionship. 

For a river is not only an appropriate symbol of con- 
stant change ; but it is also a picture of permanence. Its 
water is forever flowing away, but the stream remains 
exhaustlessly replenished. For millions of years there 
has been some sort of watershed from the peaks of the 
Adirondacks southward to the ocean. Its course has been 
affected by many changes in the earth's surface. The sea 



166 What Is There in Keligiok? 

has been nearer and farther; the land has risen and sub- 
sided; the mountain-tops have been higher and the river- 
bed much lower; the path taken by the water has varied 
somewhat; but from the Mesozoic Period, at least, there 
has been a watercourse from their summits to the Atlantic 
in the direction where we locate the Hudson on our maps. 
So far back as our explorations of mankind can take 
us, and all down the line of human history, we discover 
religion — the flow of inspirations which men connect 
with something beyond and above them. In a recent 
text-book of European archaeology, covering the Palaeo- 
lithic period, Professor Macalister finds indications of 
religion in the life of these ancient people, whose skele- 
tons or skulls he examines ; and he comments : "It is now 
believed that just as there is no race of people, however 
low in the scale of civilization, without language or with- 
out social order, so there is no tribe or race, however 
low, without some form of religion. A completely re- 
ligionless community does not exist, and probably never 
has existed." The flow of man's nature towards the Un- 
seen appears as inevitable as the flow of moisture towards 
the great deep. When we survey the Christian centuries, 
and study the stream of the life of God in man in its 
purest and most copious flow from those loftiest moral 
heights — Bethlehem and Galilee and Calvary — we note 
more than one period when men expected this river to 
cease altogether. There was this or that circumstance in 
the condition of the times, some obstruction in the thought 
or some absorbing dryness in the life of the day, which 
portended its cessation. But it is still sweeping on, a 
majestic Hudson, when one views its breadth and volume 



Change and Permanence 167 

throughout our world ; and there is no sign of any diminu- 
tion of its abundance. The more it changes in appear- 
ance, the more it remains the same river. Plutarch, the 
Greek historian, wrote: "The divine — religion — is some- 
thing imperishable; but its forms are subject to decay. 
God bestows many good things on men; but nothing im- 
perishable ; for, as Socrates says, even what has reference 
to the gods is subject to death." But a Christian con- 
temporary of Plutarch's, writing to people who had wit- 
nessed revolutionary changes in their religion, who had 
seen the Temple at Jerusalem destroyed, its ritual become 
obsolete, and the whole face of Judaism transfigured in 
the new hope which had become theirs through One 
whom they revered as the Pioneer and Perfecter of faith, 
while he agrees with him as to the passing forms of re- 
ligion, insists that God has given man one abiding ele- 
ment: "Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, and to-day, 
yea and forever." The permanent factor for him in re- 
ligion is to be found in Christ, and in the Christlike 
Spirit, discovered as the moving current amid all the 
changing appearances of the river's course. 

When one tries to define Christianity — a very difficult 
undertaking because the instant you try to examine it you 
interfere with its flow and it loses its essential character 
— one gets at its essence most clearly in the Christlike 
movements in the thoughts and conduct of individuals 
and social groups. A river is found not in the water 
which you may be able to bail out in a pail and so inves- 
tigate. The water ceases to be a river the moment you 
capture it in your bucket. A river is found in the con- 
tinuous stream moving towards the sea-level. Chris- 



168 What Is There in Religion? 

tianity is not the religions opinions or the modes of wor- 
ship or the cnstoms of life or the forms of activity of 
any particnlar generation of believers in Jesus, which 
one can take and examine, very much as one hauls up a 
bucket of water from a running stream. The water of a 
river is ceaselessly flowing and the doctrines and ritual 
and usages and methods of Christians are forever in flux. 
Again and again men have taken Christianity at some 
point in its course — in the 'New Testament period, or in 
the undivided Church of the first three centuries, or in 
the epoch of the Protestant Reformation — and insisted 
that the beliefs or the forms of Church government or the 
usages in worship were fixed then for all time. But sub- 
sequent centuries can no more think with the minds of 
the apostles or of the Greek creed-makers, or organize 
the Church after the pattern of the early Fathers, than 
they can call back the first or the fourth or the sixteenth 
century in the stream of time. 

And how fortunate it is that one cannot stabilize re- 
ligion! Froude very cleverly criticized the attempt of 
Anglicanism to establish by law an unalterable form of 
religious institution in the Church of England : 

"If medicine had been regulated three hundred years 
ago by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-nine 
Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had 
been compelled under pains and penalties to compound 
his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's 
physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what 
state of health the people of this country would at present 
be found." 

There cannot be a river without water; and there 



Change and Pehmanence 169 

cannot be a flow of the Spirit of God without "beliefs 
and institutions and activities. But the water at any 
moment rolling by is not the river; and the ideas and 
institutions and activities even of the New Testament are 
not the Christian religion. They form merely the stream 
of the Spirit of Jesus at one moment in its long sweep 
through the ages. 

One must watch the river as it flows to describe it 
accurately; one must watch the Christian Spirit in mo- 
tion to get at the essence of the Christian faith. See a 
Paul counting all things but loss that he may be found in 
Christ and present others perfect in Him; an Augustine 
putting off his sensual life and becoming an wholly re- 
newed man in the service of Christ; a Francis of Assisi 
espousing poverty and claiming glad kinship as a child 
of God with sun and moon, beasts and birds, and every 
man to whom he can minister happiness by obedience to 
Jesus ; a Luther discovering that a Christian man is the 
most free lord of all and subject to none, and the servant 
of all, bound to be to them what Christ has been to him, 
and standing for that freedom and that servitude at the 
risk of death; a Lincoln with malice towards none, with 
charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gave 
him to see the right, setting free the bondmen, and 
preserving the unity of a nation ; an Edith Cavell discov- 
ering that patriotism is not enough and that she must 
die without hatred or bitterness towards any one; — this 
is Christianity, this is the permanent current of the 
Christian Spirit, flowing on while beliefs and institutions 
and prayers and ways of doing everything change. 

An essential need in men which drives them to religion 



170 What Is There in Religion? 

is the desire to find the abiding amid the transient, and 
thus attain a sense of being at home in an estranging 
world. A brilliant contemporary Jewish writer, Ludwig 
Lewisohn, who has recently unveiled his soul in an auto- 
biography which bitterly indicts our American life, says 
of his early religious impressions in a southern city and 
of that which drew him to churches, Protestant and Ro- 
man Catholic: 

"I had a sense, shadowy and inarticulate, but deep 
enough, of our homelessness in the universe, of our ter- 
rible helplessness before it. I had seen something of mis- 
fortune and uncertainty and change, and my mind de- 
sired then, as, with frugal hope, it does now, a point of 
permanence in the Vast driftings of the cosmic weather/ 
a power in which there is no variableness, neither shadow 
of turning." 

He concludes his bitter narrative with a total rejection 
of Theistic belief, to which he attributes all manner of 
social evil, and with a violent repudiation of Christian 
ethics as he sees them embodied in the current industrial 
and international order; but his soul still cleaves with 
religious devotion to truth and beauty and human brother- 
hood — which are the chief expressions for others of the 
presence of the Deity whom he so scornfully denies. His 
interpretation of the universe robs him of that point of 
permanence which Christian believers find in God, to 
whom they pray: 

Change and decay in all around I see; 
O Thou who changest not, abide with me. 



Change and Permanence 171 

But it is perhaps not so much "a point of permanence" 
as an abiding flow of the Spirit which they discover, a 
stream which continues despite the constant passing of 
its water. Up in the Adirondacks, where the Hudson's 
headwaters form, there are brooks which during part of 
the year disappear from sight ; one sees in their channels 
a dry bed of stones. One may notice similar totally arid 
watercourses in men's spirits. Tormented by doubts, 
August Hermann Francke, the future Pietist professor 
of Halle, resolved to call upon God in whom he did not 
think that he believed, and uttered the remarkable prayer : 
"Thou art the cause of my suffering, O non-existing God, 
for if Thou didst exist, then should I also really exist." 
But while the beds of our Adirondack brooks may be dry 
in summer, the moisture is seeping along through the 
gravel underneath. So, concealed from their own sight 
and out of view of those who know them best, the spiritual 
stream still makes its way in the souls of those who fancy 
it has ceased in them altogether. We spoke of the im- 
possibility of recalling the religion of our childhood; but 
while that has gone irretrievably, as yesterday's water in 
any brook has flowed away, the stream may re-emerge. 
In the Autobiography of Henry M. Stanley, he tells us 
how in Africa the river of an early piety, for years out 
of sight, suddenly surprised him by re-appearing. Cut off 
from newspapers and unable to carry other books along, 
he had with him a Bible which he began to read: 

"When I laid down the book, the mind commenced to 
feed upon what memory suggested. Then rose the ghosts 
of bygone yearnings, haunting every cranny of the brain 
with numbers of baffled hopes and unfulfilled aspirations. 



172 What Is There m Eeligioit? 

Here was I, only a poor journalist, with no friends, and 
yet possessed by a feeling of power to achieve! How 
could it ever be? Then verses of Scripture rang iterat- 
ingly through my mind as applicable to my own being, 
sometimes full of promise, often of solemn warning. 

Alone in my tent, my mind labored and worked upon 
itself, and nothing was so soothing and sustaining as 
when I remembered the long-neglected comfort and sup- 
port of lonely childhood and boyhood. I flung myself on 
my knees, and poured out my soul utterly in secret prayer 
to Him from whom I had been so long estranged, to Him 
who had led me mysteriously into Africa, there to reveal 
Himself, and His will. I became then inspired with 
fresh desire to serve Him to the utmost, that same desire 
which in early days in N*ew Orleans filled me each morn- 
ing, and sent me joyfully skipping to my work." 

Many persons go through several transformations in 
their religious views, and may alter their church affilia- 
tions two or three times, and they frequently think these 
changes involve complete breaks with their previous 
spiritual life; but those who watch the course of their 
careers are aware of the continuity of the stream of in- 
spiration within them. Amid the alterations in our ideas 
and fluctuations in our feelings, we can say with a New 
Testament writer: "They shall pass; but Thou con- 
tinuest." They belong to the outward man which perish- 
eth, while the inward man is renewed day by day. And 
even where the interruptions in religious experience are 
not so marked, and there are no decided breaks with the 
past, there are differences which make a man seem a 
stranger to his former emotions and inspirations. Our 
religious associations change with everything else in the 
world; new teachers take the place of old ones; old texts 



Change and Permanence 173 

acquire new meanings; fresh voices bring their messages 
when long-known tones no longer fall upon our ears ; but 
there is familiarity amid difference in the set of the soul 
Godward. McLeod Campbell writes: "I felt this morn- 
ing in reading an Epistle which I had not read for some 
time, all its living truth and divine love freshly affecting 
me, and yet as what I had felt before." Father Eaber 
goes on in the poem to the God of his childhood, from 
which we have already quoted : 

Thou broadenest out with every year, 

Each breadth of life to meet : 
I scarce can think Thou art the same, 

Thou art so much more sweet. 

Changed and not changed, Thy present charms 

Thy past ones only prove ; 
Oh, make my heart more strong to bear 

This newness of Thy love ! 

These novelties of love! — when will 

Thy goodness find an end? 
"Whither will Thy compassions, Lord, 

Incredibly extend? 

r AVid this brings us to another connection between a 
river and permanence. The constantly flowing stream is 
bound somewhither. One can scarcely look at the mov- 
ing current without having his thought carried to its des- 
tination: "Into what does this river empty?" So is it 
with the life in which there is a religious current. There 
are men and women who give the impression of belonging 
to this world. They are at home in its ways, take it as 
they find it, have an eye to its main chances, are un- 



174 What Is There itt Religion? 

troubled by the level of its standards, enjoy its pleas- 
ures, put up with its discomforts, and cast no wistful 
glances towards ideals beyond its horizons. Pontius 
Pilate seems to belong in the Roman Empire. He has 
no purposes which are too large for its confines, no long- 
ings past its capacities to gratify, no yearning towards 
something beyond and afar from it. Jesus of Nazareth 
seems a stranger moving through it, with both the sources 
and goals of His being outside it. His purposes require 
eternity for their fulfillment, His longings only God and 
the fellowship of innumerable brethren in God can 
satisfy. Jeremy Taylor in a funeral sermon said of the 
Lady Carbery: "In all her religion, she had a strange 
evenness and untroubled passage, sliding towards her 
ocean of God and of infinity with a certain and silent 
motion." Men and women of genuine Christian con- 
science appear, like a river, to be always en route. They 
crave a diviner order for the world and more Christlike 
spirits for themselves, and these cravings of their souls, 
like the pull of gravitation on water drawing it towards 
sea-level, create in them a flow setting forth towards 
love, towards God who is love, towards the vast deep of 
love's full life for all. In their company one catches 
"murmurs and scents of the infinite sea." They feel 
with the hymn-writer: 

Eivers to the ocean run, 

Nor stay in all their course; . . . 

So my soul, derived from God, 

Pants to view His glorious face, 

Forward tends to His abode, 
To rest in His embrace. 



Change and Permanence 175 

A second life has no attraction for those who are bored 
with this. Those who "kill time" here, are not allured 
by the prospect of an eternity "to kill" yonder. But they 
whose aims for themselves, for their beloved, for man- 
kind, are as far-reaching as those of Jesus need limitless 
scope for their achievement. And as the river in its 
steady movement bears witness to the existence of the 
ocean towards which it glides, so men and women moving 
towards divine purposes testify to the existence of a 
spiritual sea-level in the universe — to God and life 
eternal in and with Him. The river is always moving 
out from the land which has formed its banks, but its 
waters are not lost. "The world passeth away and the 
lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth 
forever." 

We began our discussion with the somewhat impatient 
and cynical question: "What is there in religion any- 
how?" We have used the Hudson River as a parable 
of the various benefits which the stream of the Spirit of 
faith renders to believers. Many think that there is 
nothing but self-hypnosis in religious belief. Men fancy 
a God, driven to this imagination by their sex impulse, 
or by some other unsatisfied element in their natures; 
and then they derive comforts and incentives from the 
contemplation of this imagined Lover, Father and 
Friend. But does that explanation really account for the 
facts? One need not deny that the religious impulse is 
closely related with those of sex and of hunger. Indeed 
it belongs with the most primitive and strongest im- 
pulses in man's make-up; it is an essential component of 
his being. But is it conceivable that from an illusion 



176 What Is There in Religion? 

men and women through many generations have derived 
refreshment, cleansing, power, illumination, fruitfulness, 
buoyancy, adventure, beauty, unity, a sense of perma- 
nence? It is no imaginary Hudson which affords cor- 
responding benefits to those who live in its neighborhood. 
Why should the stream of religion, conferring these 
vastly more valuable spiritual benefits, be any more illu- 
sory ? In response to a Questionnaire sent out by Profes- 
sor Pratt, now of Williams College, William James wrote 
that he believed in God because "the whole line of testi- 
mony on this point is so strong that I cannot pooh-pooh 
it away. No doubt there is a germ in me of something 
similar that makes response." 

If the religious impulse in man be intimately allied 
with that of sex, why is it not an evidence of an equally 
objective reality? Do not organisms develop in response 
to external stimuli — plants evolving chlorophyll in an- 
swer to light, bodies the haemoglobin in red corpuscles in 
answer to oxygen? Is not faith a response in the soul 
to as real a God? As chlorophyll appropriates the sun- 
light and builds up the plant, as haemoglobin in blood 
corpuscles appropriates oxygen and aerates the system, 
producing combustion and supplying physical energy, 
faith appropriates the Spirit of God and brings His life 
to strengthen and energize ours. Why should God be 
more illusory than the mate to whom the sex impulse 
points, or the light to which chlorophyll responds, or the 
oxygen to which haemoglobin answers? 

And were this stream of the Spirit, were the living 
God, an illusion, would He have retained His permanent 
place in human trust through all the ages? Would not 



Change and Permanence 177 

the illusion have been found out — as time and again some 
skeptical thinker has declared the fraud unmasked — and 
would not the notion of a companionable God have re- 
mained discredited? Had nature made a misstep when 
she built up chlorophyll in plants, it would never have 
become the very common element which it is. Had man 
made a mistake when his spirit reached forth in trust, 
religion could not have become the almost universal and 
enduring component in human nature which it is. Chlo- 
rophyll is itself a witness to the existence of sunlight, the 
sex impulse a witness to the existence of mates, religion 
a witness to the reality of God. 

We have been stressing the permanency of the Hudson 
Eiver, despite the constant flowing away of the water 
which composes it. That permanency is due to its con- 
nection with the fabric of the world, the scheme of na- 
ture. The sun in the heavens drawing up moisture and 
forming clouds, the showers which fill the springs and 
keep moist the slopes of the mountains, the snows which 
pile up on those uplands every winter, the lie of the land 
furnishing a watershed down the valley towards the At- 
lantic — all combine to assure the continued existence of 
the Hudson Eiver which is constantly gliding away. Is 
not the only reasonable interpretation of the abiding pres- 
ence of religion in the life of men that it, too, is connected 
with the spiritual basis of the universe, that God is as 
actual as sun and showers and mountains and valley and 
ocean ? 

It is one thing to know of the Hudson Eiver, because 
you happen to have learned of it from a geography, and 
to have seen its line on a map; it is quite another thing 



178 What Is There in Keligion? 

to spend your life beside it, to find your recreation in the 
summits where it rises and do your work in a city which 
it cleanses and provides with harbor, to know from experi- 
ence its refreshment and loveliness and utility. It is 
one thing to be convinced that the God and Father of 
Jesus Christ exists, because He seems the reasonable ex- 
planation of the faith of those who claim to know Him, 
and to accord Him a place on your map of being; it is 
quite another thing to pass your life in His companion- 
ship, and know for yourself "the fullness of God." 



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